Under/Over

There is a particular dishonesty in the phrase "I'm over it." Anyone who has ever tried to say it and mean it simultaneously knows the gap between the declaration and the reality. You can deliver the words without wavering and still find yourself ambushed by a memory at three in the morning. In "Under/Over," the third track from her debut EP minor, Gracie Abrams maps that gap with uncanny precision. The song lives in the space between the performance of having moved on and the private admission that you have not.

The Summer of minor

The minor EP arrived on July 14, 2020, on Interscope Records. Its original release date had been pushed back from June: Abrams chose to delay the project out of respect for the Black Lives Matter protests that dominated public attention in the weeks following the murder of George Floyd.^[1] The EP arrived quietly into a summer defined by both collective upheaval and private reckoning.

What makes the circumstances of minor unusual is a biographical detail Abrams has been candid about in interviews. The songs on the EP were written largely in response to the end of a relationship. The producer who helped shape the record was Blake Slatkin, the same person the material was about. As Abrams described it, she was writing songs in response to their breakup, and then they made a project about it together.^[2] This was not a comfortable arrangement, but it was a productive one.

"Under/Over" emerged from those sessions, co-written by Abrams with Jack Karaszewski, Henry Kwapis, Carol Ades, and Slatkin.^[3] In interviews around the EP's release, Abrams spoke about how her collaborators introduced experimental sonic layers she described as small, unexpected textural details that transformed a sparse acoustic sketch into something more visual and spatially alive.^[4] The result is a song that sounds intimate but slightly unsteady, like a room whose walls have been quietly shifted.

The Meaning Hidden in a Slash

The title does a great deal of work. Under/Over is not a single word but two words held apart by a slash, which functions as a kind of uncertain hinge. "Over" in the vernacular of relationships means finished, done, past the point of pain. "Under" suggests the opposite: submerged, overwhelmed, buried beneath something. Placing the two side by side without choosing between them is the song's whole thesis.

The slash also gestures toward something like a wager. In betting, under/over describes a prediction about whether something will fall above or below a given line. There is no commitment implied, only an ongoing suspension of judgment. Abrams doesn't resolve the gamble. She leaves the listener in the moment before the outcome is known.

The song's structure mirrors this ambivalence. It opens from a position of declared confidence, projecting a voice that claims agency and control over its own feelings. But that confidence softens as the song develops. What had seemed like a statement of recovery begins to read as a hope, a rehearsal, a wish that has not yet fully come true. The title gives you both words at once because the narrator is experiencing both states at once.

Confession as Performance, Performance as Confession

One recurring tension in Abrams' early songwriting is the difficulty of separating genuine emotion from the performance of emotion for an audience of one. She has spoken about a habit of centering the problem as she perceives it rather than sitting with the full complexity of her own reactions.^[4] "Under/Over" catches her in the act of doing exactly that: building a case for her own emotional progress before quietly revealing, through the slippage of the lyric, that she doesn't entirely believe it.

This is not dishonesty in any simple sense. It is the particular honesty of recording a thought in the exact moment it fractures. The narrator is trying something out loud, watching herself say it, and discovering that the words don't quite hold. There is more courage in that kind of self-examination than in simply declaring heartbreak or declaring recovery. The song is interested in the precarious moment between the two.

The production reinforces the lyrical ambivalence. Nothing in the arrangement resolves cleanly. The sparse but layered sonic palette, with its unexpected textural details, keeps the listener in a state of gentle suspension that matches the emotional posture of the narrator and refuses to settle what the lyric refuses to settle.

Position Within the EP

"Under/Over" occupies the third position on an EP of seven tracks, and its placement matters. It follows "Friend" and "21," which deal with the disorientation of a relationship unraveling and the bittersweet acceptance that an ex will go on living a full life without you. It arrives before the more raw emotional honesty of "I Miss You, I'm Sorry" and the quieter self-repair of "Long Sleeves." In this arc, "Under/Over" is the pivot: the moment where the narrator reaches for solid ground before discovering it isn't entirely solid.^[1]

Another track from the EP, the closing title song "minor," shares a preoccupation with thresholds and the uncomfortable space between a younger and older self. Where "minor" holds the memory of a relationship from a careful distance, "Under/Over" is still inside the room with it. Both songs resist resolution, but "Under/Over" is the less resigned of the two: it is still arguing with itself.

Bedroom Pop and the Confessional Tradition

Abrams' work places her within a tradition of self-revealing song running from Joni Mitchell through Elliott Smith to Phoebe Bridgers: artists who treated the song as a space where emotional reality could be examined rather than polished. The minor EP was recorded largely in her bedroom in Pacific Palisades, and that material context gives "Under/Over" its characteristic intimacy.^[5] You hear a voice that has not been asked to project.

The EP was released in summer 2020, when many listeners were confined to domestic space and unusually attentive to music made in similar conditions. The pandemic gave bedroom pop a particular resonance that year: here was music that had already built its aesthetic from confinement, that treated intimacy as an artistic method rather than a limitation to overcome.

NME described the EP as "seven emotional diary entries transposed to song form," placing Abrams as a standout new voice in confessional indie pop.^[6] "Under/Over" fits that framing precisely: it reads like an entry written in the middle of the night, catching a feeling before it could be revised into something more flattering.

Alternative Readings

A song built around a binary can always be read from both sides. "Under/Over" can also be understood as a song about oscillation rather than coexistence: the narrator is not simultaneously both states but moving rapidly between them, ricocheting from conviction that she is over it to the reality that she is under it again. In this reading, the slash is a tempo marking rather than a statement of duality.

There is also a more relational interpretation. Under and over can describe the power dynamic within a relationship itself: who is holding the other up, who is being held under. Breakups are rarely symmetrical, and the title might be asking which role the narrator occupied, or whether the roles kept switching. Abrams doesn't provide a clean answer, and that open question is part of what gives the song its staying power.

A Small Song That Stays

minor is an EP about a specific breakup written in real time with one of the people involved. "Under/Over" is its most precise cartography of the in-between: the place where you are technically finished grieving but the grief has not received the news. At two minutes and twenty-one seconds, it does not overstay its welcome.^[3]

In the years since its release, Abrams has opened for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour, earned a Grammy nomination, and watched "That's So True" top charts in more than ten countries.^[5] The scale of her career has expanded considerably since the summer of 2020. But the quality that made "Under/Over" resonate, the willingness to catch herself in the act of not quite being okay while trying to convince herself otherwise, is the same quality that has sustained her work across every project since.

The slash between under and over holds the space open. You can stand in it.