Gracie Abrams’ third album is a full-blown crime scene. Across 16 songs, the US songwriter catalogues slip knots, blades, bullets, knives, more knives, ghosts, cages, drugs, car crashes, blood, burial, flaming tyres, choking, burning houses, sinking ships, drowning, more blood, bloody knees and even more knives. It’s called Daughter from Hell to acknowledge how much the 26-year-old frayed her parents’ nerves as a reckless teen, part of a wider theme about working out when to blame others for her pain, and when to accept responsibility. Clearly, there’s a lot of poetic licence involved in dramatising these mature revelations, but the dissonance between Abrams’ goth-coded emotional turbulence and the music’s insistent, quivering prettiness is the real uncrackable case on this bloodless record.

In one way, Abrams has had an outsized influence on pop. Her early bedroom songs inspired Olivia Rodrigo to write Drivers License, which kickstarted the former Disney star’s dazzlingly quick and continuing act of self-redefinition. Mostly, though, Abrams is the sum of her influences: you needn’t listen hard to clock Lorde’s vocal harmonies, Phoebe Bridgers’ intimacy or the tightly packed storytelling of Taylor Swift, who had Abrams support on the Eras tour. In Swift she also shares a producer in the National’s Aaron Dessner, a collaborator in Bon Iver (his jump-scare falsetto appears on two songs here, and he plays all over the record), and certainly a sound in Folklore’s pearlescent acoustics, injected with a whisper of stomp-clap vigour. That mix of melodrama and songs sung like secrets means Abrams’ audience skews young: her music carries the sensation of being the only person in the world grappling with huge emotions, as life often feels in adolescence. For anyone older, her music can feel a little starter pack.

What does Abrams have of her own? In the limiting column, a case of indie-girl voice so trembling it often sounds as if she’s singing while standing on a body-toning vibration plate. As a writer, although her songs often have big choruses, her lyrics don’t hew to traditional repeating pop structures; she prefers to unspool a story over a few minutes, ratcheting the self-aware neuroses until it’s time to flee or fight or kiss. She’s a good observer of how people hurt themselves and each other: Good Reason digs into the mystery of why nice guys who would bleed for you can be so unappealing; on Look at My Life, she sings, “I’ve been thinking through the hard stuff / Over light drugs like every night”, distilling the casual nihilism of a generation who have never seen any reason to believe that the good will out. Its heady pulse eventually boils over into an ornate crescendo, as close as things get to recklessness.

Daughter from Hell upgrades the synths of 2024’s The Secret of Us for more filigreed orchestration. The rare moments when it kicks through the heavy decor are the best. The chorus to Broke My Heart has a swashbuckling sense of indignation; the racing Men Like You sharpens as Abrams swaps her usual close-mic’d hush for piercing recriminations of someone who used her. At moments, scale feels superimposed to make songs work in the arenas that the one-time shy bedroom musician now headlines: The Knife warrants the phone-torches-on cathartic sing along, but Good Reason is just Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You coated in bland mirrorball sparkle. Set only to rolling, distorted guitar, the title track apologises to Abrams’ mother and is obviously meant to be a showstopper, but the grandeur starkly highlights the genericness of the record’s centrepiece: Abrams’ tribute plays like boilerplate wedding vows, and, across the album, we never really learn how she raised hell.

Of the smaller songs, Death Wish is most effective, its plinky sweetness abrasively underscoring lyrics seemingly about an inappropriate age-gap relationship. Otherwise, the saccharine sound chokes like a faceful of icing sugar. Humming drip-drops like rain in a puddle as Abrams whispers about her generation’s short straw: the sentiment is totally warranted, especially from the rare young pop star who speaks out on politics, but it’s unavoidably cloying. The nice country lilt to the tight vocal harmonies of What If It’s Right? quickly wears thin as Abrams and guest Marcus Mumford bludgeon the title to death. As they worry over whether a separation might make sense, you may feel like shouting just break up already. The 1-2-3, 1-2-3 word emphasis in Mews lurches like sea sickness.

The most glaring absence on Daughter from Hell is that of Audrey Hobert, Abrams’ best friend, who co-wrote six songs on The Secret of Us. Hobert has since broken out as a pop star thanks to her idiosyncratic phrasing and offbeat storytelling; presumably the separation is meant to preserve the sanctity of their respective voices as they pursue parallel careers. Hobert gets just one co-writing credit here, on a springy fan favourite called Minibar that they teased live last summer. It’s a less distinct version of Hobert’s Bowling Alley – unexplained scene shifts as an introvert feels conflicted about socialising – and Daughter from Hell’s second song to mention feeling weird at a party (Look at My Life), but still, the sudden injection of pep from a stronger, instantly identifiable voice is unmistakable. You can see why Abrams leaves her crime scenes so messy: three albums in, you’d still struggle to pick her out of a police lineup.