Good Riddance

The Perspective No One Expects

Most breakup albums are written from the inside of a wound. The narrator is wronged, the other party is distant or cruel, and the songs form a record of suffering. Gracie Abrams set herself a harder problem on Good Riddance: she wrote from the position of the person who made the mess.

Released in February 2023, her debut full-length traces the aftermath of a long-term relationship she ended, but rather than using that as license to explain or justify, she used it as an occasion to hold herself accountable. In interviews around the album's release, Abrams described wanting to move away from a songwriting habit of externalizing blame^[1], toward something more honest about where she had actually failed. That instinct, unusual in popular music and especially in the confessional pop genre where the narrator's suffering tends to be treated as self-evident and sufficient, is what gives Good Riddance its quietly unusual shape.

A Room in Someone Else's House

The album was recorded at Long Pond Studio, Aaron Dessner's facility in the Hudson Valley of New York, across roughly 25 non-consecutive days spread between spring 2021 and late 2022.^[2] Dessner, best known as a founding member of The National and as the producer of Taylor Swift's folklore and evermore, had been working with Abrams since their first meeting in 2021. Their creative rapport was unusually immediate: Dessner has described the collaboration as among the most natural of his career, noting that his instrumental instincts seemed to form a natural home for Abrams's interiority and melodic sense.^[3]

The studio itself contributes to the sound. Long Pond is a converted barn in upstate New York, and the space has an acoustic quality that resists the overworked gloss of commercial studios. Dessner's approach leaned into that texture: guitar and piano form the primary beds, draped over with ambient electronics that feel like weather rather than decoration. Abrams often worked in 12-hour stretches, sometimes producing two songs in a day, then stepping outside to walk or cook before returning.^[4]

Accountability as Art

The album's central preoccupation is the relationship between honesty and love, specifically the kind of honesty that is harder to practice from a position of guilt than from one of injury. Abrams has spoken in interviews about having been someone who avoided confrontation, who struggled to be transparent with partners, and who had developed a songwriting habit that placed the blame for difficult situations on the people around her rather than on herself.^[1]

Good Riddance represents a deliberate turn against that habit. Across its 12 tracks, she examines her own patterns of avoidance and deflection with a directness made all the more striking by the softness of her voice. She rarely arrives at closure; the album is not structured as a journey from confusion to resolution. It moves instead through layers of recognition, circling around the same painful admissions from different angles, getting a little closer to the difficult truth with each pass.

Dessner actively encouraged this tendency. He has described his role in the sessions as partly that of a creative conscience, pushing back when the material softened or retreated into easier emotional postures.^[3] The result is an album where the narrator's willingness to indict herself becomes its own form of tenderness, and where the refusal to let herself off the hook reads not as self-flagellation but as a hard-won form of respect for the relationship that ended.

The Sound of Telling the Truth

Abrams delivers almost everything in a near-whisper, a choice that creates an odd kind of intimacy: the listener feels addressed directly, privately, as though overhearing something not intended for an audience. Rolling Stone, in a profile marking the album's release, noted the peculiar tension between the softness of her delivery and the emotional precision of what she was saying, observing that her quiet voice carries a degree of observational accuracy that catches you off guard.^[5]

The whispered mode might suggest fragility, but the songs themselves do not behave like fragile things. Many of them turn on a single precise observation that opens into something larger, the kind of writing that locates a feeling most people have had but never managed to name. That quality connects her to a lineage that includes Phoebe Bridgers and the quieter corners of Taylor Swift's catalog, and critics drew those comparisons throughout reviews. NME called Good Riddance a deeply intimate portrait of growth^[6], awarding four stars and noting that Abrams had arrived with a musical voice recognizably her own even within a crowded field of confessional singer-songwriters.

The sonic palette Dessner built around that voice is deliberately restrained. Minimal instrumentation leaves space around the vocals rather than supporting or buttressing them. The production choices reinforce the album's thematic project: there is nowhere to hide. Certain tracks lean toward acoustic intimacy, others toward an ambient texture that critics compared to Dessner's folklore-era collaborations with Swift. The closing track, "Right Now," co-produced with Brian Eno^[2], expands slightly into something quieter and more suspended, a fitting gesture for an album built on the idea of sitting with discomfort rather than escaping it.

Where It Lands

Good Riddance arrived in February 2023 and peaked at number 52 on the Billboard 200 in the United States^[2], while reaching number three in the United Kingdom. It earned Abrams a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards^[7], an honor that recognized the album as a genuine arrival rather than a promising preview. Several major publications placed it on their year-end lists of 2023's best albums, with Rolling Stone ranking it among the best of the year.^[5]

The critical reception was warm, though not uniformly enthusiastic. Pitchfork classified the sound as "whisperpop" and found the production occasionally stagnant, wishing for more sonic ambition.^[2] That critique points to a real quality of the album: it prioritizes emotional texture over dramatic dynamics. The songs do not build toward cathartic release in the conventional sense. They accumulate, turn inward, and circle the thing at the center rather than attacking it directly.

Whether that reads as a limitation or a choice depends on what you are listening for. For listeners attuned to the kind of feeling the album is trying to describe, the restraint is exactly the point. Good Riddance is about what it feels like to sit inside your own accountability, to understand your own patterns clearly enough to name them and not clearly enough yet to change them. That kind of emotional terrain does not resolve into anthems. It resolves into quiet, precise, careful music, and that is what Abrams and Dessner made.

The album stands as the first chapter of a rapidly developing body of work. Abrams went on to open for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour and to release The Secret of Us in June 2024, a record that moved toward a more anthemic and commercial sound while retaining the confessional honesty that Good Riddance established. But Good Riddance remains distinctive: in a genre built around the wounded narrator, she chose to write the harder record, the one from the other side of the door.