This Is What the Drugs Are For

There's a specific kind of exhaustion that sets in when a breakup ends everywhere except inside your own head. Gracie Abrams built an entire song around that exhaustion and named it plainly: "This Is What the Drugs Are For," the ninth track on her 2023 debut album, Good Riddance, treats getting high, staying busy, and forcing yourself to sleep as different names for the same losing strategy, anything that might make a person stop thinking about somebody who is no longer around to think about.^[4]

The song doesn't sensationalize substance use so much as use it as the sharpest available shorthand for something more universal: the impulse to reach for anything, chemical or otherwise, that promises to quiet a mind that keeps circling back to the same person, long after the relationship itself has ended.^[1]

A Breakup Album Built on Self-Scrutiny

Good Riddance arrived in February 2023 as Abrams's full-length debut, following two earlier EPs, and it was written largely in the aftermath of a long relationship that had defined much of her early twenties.^[4] Rather than positioning herself as the wronged party, Abrams has said in interviews that she wanted the record to mark a deliberate break from a songwriting habit she recognized in herself, a tendency to externalize blame, in favor of something closer to honest self-accountability.^[3]

She made the album with Aaron Dessner of The National at his Long Pond Studio in New York's Hudson Valley, working in long, non-consecutive sessions that let the songs stay unpolished and immediate rather than over-considered.^[4] "This Is What the Drugs Are For" fits that accountability project by turning its scrutiny inward. Rather than blaming an ex-partner for lingering in her thoughts, the narrator studies her own compulsive attempts to make the feeling disappear, and finds the attempts wanting.

The production leans into that inward turn. Dessner's arrangement keeps the instrumentation spare, mostly guitar and piano with a low ambient hum underneath, leaving very little for the listener to hide behind. That austerity mirrors the song's subject: a mind stripped of distraction, left alone with the same loop of thoughts no matter what activity it tries to substitute in their place.

Rolling Stone's profile of the album, published around its release, singled out Abrams's near-whispered vocal delivery for its unusual observational precision, noting that the softness of her voice sits oddly alongside the sharpness of what she's actually describing.^[5] That contrast defines this particular track: a hushed, almost confessional tone wrapped around a fairly unsparing self-audit of every failed coping strategy in the narrator's arsenal.

The Many Names for Numbing

What sets the song apart is its refusal to settle on a single method of self-soothing. Across its verses, the narrator works through an entire private pharmacy of avoidance, drugs, certainly, but also counting, cleaning, and sleep, each one deployed like a different treatment for the same recurring symptom.^[1] The title's "drugs" become shorthand for that whole repertoire: whatever a person reaches for late at night when a thought refuses to stop arriving.

That refusal to settle is also what makes the song feel true to how heartbreak actually behaves. It rarely announces itself as one clean wave of grief. More often it shows up as a scattered set of small, repeated behaviors, each one a minor negotiation with a mind that won't cooperate. By listing several of them side by side rather than picking one dramatic method, the song captures the sheer tedium of trying to out-manage an obsession, and the way that tedium itself becomes part of the grief.

One detailed lyrical analysis of the song identifies a specific turning point often described as an "almost-call," a moment where the narrator nearly reaches for the phone to contact the person she's trying to forget, only to stop herself before following through.^[2] That small, aborted gesture does more to establish the song's emotional stakes than any of its numbing rituals: it reveals that none of the coping mechanisms were ever really about closure. They were about buying time until the impulse to reach out passed.

The same analysis points to a kind of ritual burial elsewhere in the song, a moment where the narrator seems to formally lay the relationship to rest, treating memory itself as something requiring a funeral rather than a simple ending.^[2] That image gives the song its emotional architecture. Grief here isn't one climactic wave; it's an ongoing administrative task, something to be managed, filed, and re-filed on a nightly basis.

Color as a Container for Grief

By the song's back half, the imagery narrows into a tight cluster of cold, muted colors, indigo, blue, gray, used almost interchangeably to name the exact shade of the ache the narrator is trying to describe.^[2] That narrowing is itself a coping strategy. Naming a feeling precisely, giving it a color and something like a temperature, is a way of gaining a small measure of control over an experience that otherwise resists being pinned down.

Color functions this way elsewhere across Good Riddance too. Cold hues recur throughout the album as emotional shorthand for lingering hurt, but "This Is What the Drugs Are For" arguably represents that palette at its coldest and least redemptive, the version of blue that hasn't yet warmed into anything resembling hope or forward motion. Later tracks on the record eventually let that same color soften into something more open; positioned as the album's ninth song, this track sits well within that earlier, colder stretch of the sequence, still fully inside the freeze rather than moving out of it.

Why the Song Resonates

Confessional pop has always trafficked in heartbreak, but this particular move, cataloguing every failed method of self-soothing rather than dwelling on the heartbreak itself, feels distinctly suited to its cultural moment. It lands in an era saturated with therapeutic vocabulary, where terms like coping mechanism and self-medicating have entered ordinary conversation, and where listeners are often fluent in naming their own avoidance behaviors even while they keep performing them anyway.

The song's honesty about that gap, between knowing exactly what you're doing to yourself and doing it regardless, is a large part of why it resonates. It doesn't offer the comfort of a lesson learned or a clean recovery arc. It sits inside the loop rather than narrating an exit from it, which is a harder and rarer thing for a pop song to attempt, and it asks the listener to sit inside that loop too rather than watch it from a safe distance.

That posture also fits the aims Abrams has described for Good Riddance as a whole. She's spoken about wanting the album to function as an act of accountability rather than a collection of grievances,^[3] and a song built around someone bargaining, unsuccessfully, with her own coping strategies asks more of both narrator and listener than one that simply assigns blame to an absent ex.

There's also something quietly relatable in the specific rituals the song reaches for. Cleaning a room at 1 a.m., counting something meaningless just to occupy the mind, forcing an early bedtime as a form of avoidance, none of these require a dramatic backstory to recognize. They are the small, slightly embarrassing coping mechanisms most people have tried at some point, which is likely why so much of the writing about this song focuses less on its subject matter and more on how precisely it names something listeners already knew but hadn't put into words.

Critics responded warmly to that overall shift toward accountability. NME's four-star review of Good Riddance praised the album as a deeply intimate portrait of growth,^[4] a description that applies with particular force to a song like this one, which trades the easier catharsis of blame for the harder, less flattering work of documenting one's own stalled coping strategies in real time. That willingness to look unflinchingly at her own patterns, rather than at what someone else did to her, is arguably what separates Good Riddance from a more conventional breakup record, and this track is where that separation is most audible.

Alternative Readings

Some listeners take the title close to face value, hearing the song as a specific, candid acknowledgment of substance use during a genuinely hard period, an admission that fits into a broader tradition of confessional songwriting willing to name self-medication without glamorizing it. Others read drugs as a more expansive metaphor, arguing the song is really about the broader human tendency to treat any repetitive behavior, chemical or otherwise, as a way of outsourcing emotional regulation to something outside the self.

Both readings can hold at once, and the song never resolves the ambiguity, which seems to be the point rather than an oversight. Whether a listener hears a literal admission or a metaphor for compulsive ritual, the song's central observation stands either way: none of it actually works, not completely, and that persistent failure is what keeps the narrator, and the song itself, circling back to where it started.

Conclusion

"This Is What the Drugs Are For" earns its place on Good Riddance not by resolving its central ache but by cataloguing, with unusual precision, every method its narrator tries and fails to use against it. In an album built around the discipline of self-accountability, this is the track where that discipline turns most sharply inward: less interested in explaining why the relationship ended than in documenting what it costs, night after night, to keep it in the past.