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Gracie Abrams, the year’s biggest pop star: ‘Trump has only been in office a month, and everybody is more at risk’

After dodging toxic fans, ‘nepo baby’ jibes and her own projectile vomit, the 25-year-old has just spent eight weeks at UK No 1. She explains why she’s now writing about our dark, uncertain future

It’s a smart way to build a committed fanbase, and it played into a pervasive idea of Abrams as what one writer called “gen Z’s most unfiltered storyteller”: a singer-songwriter whose work was essentially private diary entries set to music, and who whispered her lyrics as if personally confiding in the listener. She has pulled off the enviable trick of establishing a fanbase who feel her songs confide her innermost secrets to them, while also drawing a veil over her private life, only ever discussing it publicly in the vaguest terms (she is presumed to be in a relationship with actor Paul Mescal, but has never confirmed it to the wider world). On the one hand, that means her success has played out to a constant background hum of sniping in which the phrase “nepo baby” figures heavily, but there are presumably worse preparations for fame than growing up in a celebrity-adjacent Hollywood family.

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