Gracie Abrams' delicate, heartfelt pop packs out The O2 in London

She’s strikingly similar to Taylor Swift (fondly referred to as a ‘Taydaughter’ across social media platforms) in songwriting style (confessional, relatable, acoustic guitar-laden), fan devotion level (the hair bow appears to be the Abrams equivalent of the Eras friendship bracelet), and ability to forge a meaningful connection with the audience in a massive room. Maybe it’s something she learned opening up for Swift on a sizeable chunk of her Eras Tour, but even free of all the Taylor ties, Gracie holds her own.

After all, Gracie’s star power has been slowly ascending for years now, culminating in her most recent hit ‘That’s So True’ sticking at the top of the UK singles chart for eight weeks, but the feverish energy of that track only occasionally translates tonight. The Secret Of Us Tour opening is pure magic for a moment, ‘Felt Good About You’ has Gracie hidden behind a screen before drifting to the front of the stage for ‘Risk’, where dry ice billows into the crowd, and ‘Blowing Smoke’ completes the opening trio of tracks following the running order of the record.

Gracie Abrams’ signatures become clearer on stage, the songs are tremendously wordy, and the mostly-teenage-girl crowd impressively keep up, feeling every syllable. While the set leans (obviously) heavily on 2024’s breakthrough album ‘The Secret Of Us’, there’s a surprising lack of debut ‘Good Riddance’, and a slight preference for her own earlier work from EP ‘minor’. Amongst those is ‘21’, the song she opened her first ever London show with at Omeara in 2021, a performance she reminisces in a speech where she seems bewildered by her own rise.

But after the initial boom, it becomes apparent that this is how much of the set will go. Frustratingly, Gracie’s performance style doesn’t seem to have evolved much since that very first show, and sure, her music is intimate, but The O2 isn’t, and it’s hard to fill it without significantly beefing the tracks up, a choice that is rarely made here. Gracie is often pegged as part of the new pop crop, and statistically she absolutely is, but when pitted against her peers - Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Tate McRae, as a few - and what they’d do with a space like this, it’s hard to view them as at the same level.

Clocking in at almost two hours long, the set switch up in the second half is very welcome. Gracie’s B-stage aims to replicate the bedroom where she writes most of her songs, and from where she began building her own community in the pandemic, streaming live performances on Zoom. It’s here where she shines the brightest, bringing some 20,000 people in close, letting them into her world in the way the lyrics do. Here she chooses to debut a new song she’d written a couple of months ago, titled ‘Death Wish’, about a friend who was dating a ‘mega-narcissist’. It’s classic Abrams.

When she returns to the main stage for the final stretch, it’s as cathartic as you’d wish the rest of the show had been. ‘us.’, the Taylor Swift-featuring and ‘folklore’-indebted semi-titular track blossoms fantastically, amped up just enough to hurtle into ‘Free Now’. The encore, ‘That’s So True’ and ‘Close To You’ is a confetti cannon away from perfect pop euphoria.

Perhaps Gracie’s rapid incline has meant she’s here too early, but compared to the coziness of her Shepherds Bush Empire show a mere 18 months ago, The O2 is missing that warmth. Still, it’s hard not to see Gracie Abrams’ potential, and with the legions of fans she has and material to warrant them, there’s no way this will be her only headline show here.