Risk

There is a particular kind of feverish anticipation that precedes real knowledge of another person. Before the first date, before the conversation that goes too long, before the moment someone becomes real rather than imagined, there is a window of pure and almost terrifying possibility. Gracie Abrams built an entire song around that window.

"Risk," the lead single from her second studio album The Secret of Us, released May 1, 2024, is not a song about love. It is a song about the moment before love, when everything is still hypothetical and the stakes feel enormous precisely because almost nothing has happened yet.^[1]

The Eras Tour and a Sound Built for Stadiums

To understand why Abrams wrote this particular song at this particular moment requires a brief detour into the year that preceded the album. In April 2023, she began an extended run as opening act for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, the highest-grossing concert series in history.^[2] Night after night, Abrams watched tens of thousands of people singing in unison, connecting across a shared body of music. The experience permanently changed how she thought about what a song could do.

"Touring informed so much about how I went about writing this next album," she told UPROXX.^[3] Her debut album Good Riddance (2023) had been characterized by a more introverted, chamber-folk aesthetic. The arena audiences of the Eras Tour pushed her toward songs with more communal reach, songs with space for other people inside them.

After the tour, Abrams moved in with her best friend and primary collaborator Audrey Hobert. The two spent roughly ten months writing together on their couch, processing the full emotional landscape of early adult relationships, feeding off each other's experiences, and cultivating the kind of dramatic, unguarded confessional energy the album required.^[1] "Risk" was written in August 2023, born directly from a real crush, a specific and consuming infatuation of the kind that derails sleep and hijacks thought.^[4]

Knowing You're Ridiculous and Choosing It Anyway

What distinguishes "Risk" from ordinary crush songs is the narrator's relationship to her own irrationality. She is not swept away unknowingly. She sees clearly that she is investing enormous emotional energy in someone she barely knows. And she chooses it anyway.

This marks a significant departure from the anxiety-driven self-sabotage that characterized much of Good Riddance, where overthinking and fear repeatedly derailed connection. In "Risk," Abrams adopts a fundamentally different posture. The narrator opens the song already aware that what she's feeling is disproportionate to the facts, already a little embarrassed about how invested she is in a person she hasn't properly met yet. That self-awareness doesn't diminish the feeling. It becomes the source of the song's wry humor and its emotional honesty.

Abrams told SPIN that the song captures "the mania before you actually even know someone, where you get it all sick and twisted in your head and feel like you have a fever and can't control your body and mind."^[5] The fever metaphor is instructive. A fever is not chosen, but how you respond to it is. The narrator in "Risk" decides to run with it.

In the Genius Verified breakdown, both Abrams and Hobert acknowledged the absurdity of the feeling openly, noting that from the outside the infatuation looked objectively overblown. But this self-awareness was structural, not apologetic. The two described wanting to create a space where "the most dramatic and embarrassing feelings were okay to express as loudly as we wanted."^[4] The result is a song that is earnest and self-mocking simultaneously, which is a genuinely difficult register to hit.

Swimming, Drowning, and the Active Choice

The central image of "Risk" draws on water, specifically the contrast between drowning as a passive fate and swimming as an active engagement. The song frames its emotional stakes as a deliberate choice: you might go under, but entering the water is still worth it.

In the Genius Verified session, Abrams and Hobert explained that the phrasing around the swimming idea was intentional, designed to emphasize that the narrator is making a decision rather than being helplessly submerged.^[4] Risk is acknowledged; safety is consciously set aside. The chorus's emotional logic is not "I can't help myself" but rather "I know what I'm getting into and I'm getting into it."

This transforms what could be a passive romantic declaration into something more philosophically interesting. The narrator isn't waiting for certainty before committing emotionally. She is choosing uncertainty as a value in itself. The song suggests that the feeling is worth having precisely because it is risky, that safety and the avoidance of drowning means forfeiting the experience of swimming at all.

Best Friends Enabling Each Other's Insanity

One of the quieter dimensions of "Risk" is how much it is a product of female friendship as a creative structure. Abrams has described her writing partnership with Hobert as a space where emotional extravagance was not just permitted but actively encouraged. "Making things with Audrey felt like this stamp of validation on all feelings," she said, crediting "the beautiful quality of best friends enabling each other's insanity" as one of the animating forces behind the album's emotional tone.^[4]

When your best friend is also your co-writer and your roommate, a particular permission structure emerges. Neither person has to be embarrassed about how much she feels, because both are equally deep in it. The Genius Verified session captures this: both Abrams and Hobert laughing through the more hyperbolic moments, treating the absurdity not as something to temper but as something to lean into fully.^[4]

The music video, directed by Hobert, extends this sensibility visually. It depicts Abrams on a dark suburban street, crashing parties, staying up too late, and ultimately stopping the chase and beginning to run in her own direction. Friendship and self-determination are woven together throughout.^[6]

The First Chapter of a Larger Story

Abrams described "Risk" as "the first chapter" of The Secret of Us, introducing the emotional orientation the entire record inhabits before any of the subsequent complications arrive.^[7] The album arc moves through infatuation, intimacy, rupture, and something resembling resolution. "Risk" establishes the terms under which the narrator is willing to engage with love at all: with open eyes, with self-awareness, and with a willingness to be vulnerable even when the potential cost is visible.

This framing matters for understanding the album as a whole. Later tracks on The Secret of Us, including the Taylor Swift collaboration "us.," reckon with the deeper costs of that kind of emotional investment.^[1] "Risk" is the threshold moment: the narrator before consequences, still in the stage where everything is possibility and the fever hasn't broken yet.

Critical Reception and Cultural Resonance

"Risk" arrived at a moment when Abrams was transitioning from critical-darling status to genuine mainstream visibility. Her 2023 Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, combined with her months on the Eras Tour, had introduced her to audiences far beyond the indie-folk circles where she'd built her initial following.^[2]

The song registered immediately with critics. Rolling Stone observed that it signaled a more accessible, pop-oriented direction for an artist whose earlier work had sat comfortably in the indie-folk space.^[6] The California Tech noted the single was "more brisk and vibrant" than Abrams' characteristic breathy sound, a meaningful departure from her established aesthetic.^[8] NME praised the album it launched as bringing "a new type of intimacy" to her work.^[9]

Atwood Magazine noted something specific about the track's delivery: the quick rhythm of Abrams' vocals physically mimics the frantic, short-circuiting quality of a new crush, creating a formal correspondence between the song's subject and its performance.^[10] This is not accidental. Abrams and Hobert wrote "Risk" with live performance in mind, wanting audiences to be able to shout it together at shows, aiming for something communal and cathartic.^[4]

In the broader pop landscape of 2024, "Risk" landed well because it offered something relatively rare: a song about romantic vulnerability that didn't require its narrator to be swept away passively. It treated the choice to feel deeply as something a person could make deliberately, with humor and full awareness of the possible consequences. That combination of self-awareness and genuine emotional commitment is difficult to achieve, and audiences responded.

Another Reading: Artistic Vulnerability

At its most literal, "Risk" is about romantic infatuation. But there is a secondary reading in which the song maps just as naturally onto the experience of artistic exposure and professional risk.

Abrams was navigating a significant creative transition when she wrote it. Coming off the Eras Tour with heightened expectations, reaching for a bigger, more pop-oriented sound than her previous work had employed, and working in a newly collaborative arrangement with Hobert, she was genuinely gambling on a new version of herself as an artist.^[3] The language of the song, of surrendering to something you cannot fully control, of choosing to swim rather than standing safely on the shore, carries well into that experience.

This is likely not what Abrams consciously intended the song to be about. But the best pop songs carry more weight than their stated subjects, and "Risk" is no exception. Its insistence on choosing vulnerability, on finding the appeal in the riskier option, resonates well beyond the specific scenario the lyrics depict.

The Space Before Everything Happens

"Risk" works because it captures something most love songs skip: the moment of decision before anything has happened. It honors the kind of feeling that exists in the space between "I have a crush" and "we have something real," the feverish, slightly ridiculous state of being emotionally invested in a person who has not yet become fully real to you.

What makes it extraordinary is not only Abrams' melodic and lyrical precision, though both are evident throughout. It is the song's stance. Rather than narrating a feeling that overcame her, Abrams presents a narrator who sees the feeling clearly, recognizes its possible absurdity, and decides yes anyway.^[5] That is a genuinely unusual move in a genre that typically privileges either helpless surrender or defensive detachment.

As an opening statement for an album and as a document of a specific creative and personal moment in Abrams' life, "Risk" stands as one of the most honest and fully realized pop songs of 2024.