Gracie Abrams is the pop star of the (next) future

This moment here Gracie Abrams has been waiting for at least five years. In an era in which artists’ careers are played out in a matter of weeks and no missteps are allowed, sixty months is an infinity. Yet it was exactly sixty months ago that the American singer-songwriter, born in 1999, released her debut single “Mean it”. Reactions? Cold. Perhaps for the then twenty-year-old singer-songwriter the time was not yet ripe to put her little head out of her bedroom and certainly the pressures linked to the surname, the same as dad JJone of the creators of “Lost”, one of the most successful series in the history of TV (as well as having directed films such as “Mission: Impossible III”, “Star Trek”, “Star Wars: The Dark Knight Rises” and “Star Wars: the rise of Skywalker – he is one of the most influential personalities in Hollywood, even his mother, the film producer Katie McGrath), must not have helped.

But Gracie didn’t throw herself away. How does that saying go? If you persist and resist, you reach and conquer. That’s what she did. That .now he is reaping the fruits of a long apprenticeship. The latest achievement in the series? It reached him yesterday, when the nominations for the 2025 Grammy Awards and his “Us”, a duet with Taylor Swift, earned a nomination in the “Best Pop Duo/Group Performance” category: a revenge after last year’s defeat, when she came close to winning the award for “Best New Artist”, revelation artist of the year, which ultimately went to Victoria Monét. By the way: Victoria Monét is completely absent from the 2025 Grammy nominations.

Gracie Abrams’ music went viral on TikTok 3 billion views. The new single, “That’s so true”, explodes in the global charts and is among the most listened to in the world on Spotify: in the last week alone it totaled 32 million streams, more than those of the hits “Espresso” and “Please please please” by Sabrina Carpenter, of “Good luck, babe!” by Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish’s “Wildflower.” How did Gracie Abrams achieve the status of pop star of the (near) future? Taylor Swift herself has something to do with it.

When in the autumn of 2022 the record-breaking pop star revealed the dates of his “Eras Tour” and the names of the opening artists, which also included that of Gracie Abrams, the latter had already begun to make her way among the new singer-songwriters generation with singles such as “Feels like” and “Where do we go now?”, also collecting guest appearances in the top shows of US TV, from the “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” to “The Late Late Show with James Corden”. The closeness to Swift boosted his career: the album “The secret of us”, released last June and returned to stores in October in the form of a deluxe edition, took first place in the Official Albums Chart Top 100, the weekly ranking of the best-selling albums in the United Kingdom, dethroning Taylor Swift herself and her “The tortured poets department”. “I can’t understand. This is the first time something I’ve done has made it to the top of a list. This means a lot to me and to the people I was lucky enough to make these songs with,” she commented. And never mind that in the USA it stopped in second place: its popularity has also exploded in the States.

Swift said of her: “She mixes fragility and introspection in a way that feels close to mine. It makes me understand that she and I started writing songs for the same reason, to try to make sense of what we feel. Sometimes I feel like when she sings she’s on the verge of tears and we’re all sitting in a circle around her listening to her stories.” “The secret of us” is a record entirely in the name of Swift: thirteen tracks that move between country, pop and indie, a path widely followed by the American pop star throughout her career. It is no coincidence that the album was produced by

Aaron Dessnerwho in addition to being one of the cornerstones of the National has also been Swift’s left hand man for four years (the right hand is, of course, Jack Antonoff): “I am deeply passionate about the writing process of every single song we have made together. They were based on seeds of truth, on real experiences of the reality of being 24 years old. Falling in love or getting out of a relationship or discovering more about yourself in the context of a new person. All these feelings that are often chaotic and awkward and doing it with someone I trust made us feel like we were breathing. All my memories related to the process of making this album make me understand how important friendship is to me.”

And there is sky-high anticipation for the next show February 25th at the Unipol Forum in Milanthe only Italian date of the tour in arenas: the concert, announced last July, was declared sold out at the end of October, four months early.