Daughter from Hell      Artist: Gracie AbramsLabel: Interscope RecordsGracie Abrams’s third album is a storm in a bell jar, a howl of twenty-something anguish muffled by tasteful production, where dark thoughts lurk beneath polite songs.It also reminds us why she has quietly become one of the most divisive pop stars of her generation. To her young fans she’s a figure of Taylor Swift-level significance, a trusted chronicler of heartache, teenage ennui and the ups and downs of early adulthood that they see coming into view just over the horizon. But others are unable to look past her Hollywood lineage as the daughter of the megaproducer JJ Abrams, regarding her as a rich kid coasting to the top. Amid all these strong feelings, the one person who seems unruffled is Abrams herself, who doggedly maintains her familiar register of mid-tempo indie introversion on the irresistibly fraught and softly roiling Daughter from Hell.The vibe is of cool-to-the-touch observational pop. That’s presumably a reflection both of Abrams’s love of shoegaze-esque ballads and of the artisanal take of Aaron Dessner, her wingman (and long-time Swift collaborator), on classic Wall of Sound production. (Imagine Phil Spector in a bedsit having listened to far too much My Bloody Valentine.)As filtered through Abrams’s voice and Dessner’s studio tweaking, the music has a gently raging quality. Emotionally and musically, things rarely rise above room temperature despite the often vivid imagery. (On the stark piano creep of Mews she compares an unravelling relationship to “four tyres flaming”.)It’s an album that tiptoes and never runs. If these songs aren’t quite afraid of their own shadow, you fear a loud bang might send them scarpering for the hills. That formula is not unique to Abrams, who, whatever else she hopes to achieve in music, clearly does not place a huge stock on originality. Her musical DNA contains elements of both Swift’s acoustic era and of Phoebe Bridgers, who shares a wispy delivery and a talent for beautifully spooky songwriting that could also pop up on a YouTube ASMR playlist.The belief that a whisper can hit more powerfully than a scream runs through the record, beginning with its cooing opener, Hit the Wall. Atop a bedrock of burbling pianos, the number recalls a painful break-up in which Abrams, with her characteristic mildness, wondered if she was trapped in an infinite loop of heartbreak.“I live in a pattern of breakdowns,” she sighs against a polite flutter of indie-style instrumentation. She is very good at this one thing: heartache pinned to the page and scrutinised against a backdrop of Mazzy Star-esque 1990s dreampop.It’s a formula with a lot of room for refinement. Abrams upgrades her vocal to a satisfyingly brittle howl on the title track, where she tries to picture her adolescence from the perspective of the mother who fretted for her daughter when she began to vanish without a trace on nights out with friends.Abrams also deploys Bon Iver-style folksy falsetto – which, in the cases of the glacially aching Humming and Broke My Heart, feature the actual Bon Iver.The campfire indie where she has chosen to pitch her tent is increasingly the dominant genre of our era, the stuff of a zillion streaming playlists and teen soap montages. Abrams is one of the most thoughtful champions, and Daughter from Hell is an engaging refinement of a gauzy sound that tiptoes right up to 1990s-style shoegaze but resists taking the obvious next step of cranking up the guitars.She sounds as if she’s building to a howl as the unplugged Sober suddenly opens out into an indie disco pogo. But she never goes over the top, and the tune benefits from that restraint. Lyrics about her flirtations with addiction are all the more powerful bottled up and held close to the chest.That isn’t to say she can’t take the handbrake off, as she does on the effervescent Minibar. It’s the most unabashedly Swiftian moment for her – although, ironically, the songs to which it pays homage (Cruel Summer is an obvious reference) are the ones Swift stopped making as soon as she started working with Dessner. Tellingly, this up-tempo number is also the lone contribution to the project from Abrams’s long-time collaborator Audrey Hobert. Had she stayed around longer, Daughter from Hell might have been a different, though not necessarily better, listen. (It certainly would have sounded a lot more like Swift.)But such moments are exceptions. Abrams generally values moderation, the figurative biting of the lip, over big pop moments or heartfelt expressions of emotion. That remains the case even when she’s singing lyrics written with her boyfriend, the former Kildare underage star and Oscar nominee Paul Mescal, as she does on Imaginary Friend, a morbid ballad that casts a cold eye on the morning after a late-night get-together.Abrams is a daughter of Hollywood privilege who embodies qualities not associated with rich Los Angeles kids: shyness and insecurity. That nepo-baby discourse will run and run – we do love to hate – but this LP rises above it, finding Abrams staking her claim to be not the new Taylor Swift but the best version yet of Gracie Abrams. She rarely raises her voice, but on Daughter from Hell she stands tall as the wallflower you can’t fail to notice.