Californian singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams reckons she’s playing to ‘a big room of shy people’. There was certainly no hyped-up hysteria before she took the stage for this penultimate date of The Secret Of Us tour, just the decorous hum of chat from her audience of predominantly teenage girls. She knows them well. In addition, she loves them, in that gushy awards-speech kind of way. 

These are the girls who live for Taylor Swift’s serious songs. Abrams herself has benefitted from Swift’s patronage, supporting her on tour and co-writing. She has even incorporated her own surprise-song mini-set from her ‘bedroom’, a B-stage kitted out to look like the room from which she streamed lockdown concerts, with the fans close enough to ask for selfies. Abrams’ songs are eloquent teen angst (boys, best friends, break-ups, breakdowns: the works) in sterile pop clothing, delivered with Ellie Goulding breathiness whether on guitar for the moderately chirpy ‘Risk’ or at piano for the vanilla diarising of ‘Gave You I Gave You I’.

She puts her hand up to being an introvert but does hold back a few more spirited tunes for the closing salvo, including the (relatively) thundering melodrama of ‘I Miss You, I’m Sorry’ and a (sort of) sassy attitude with ‘That’s So True’. These are the songs she will need to exploit for her main stage turn at TRNSMT in July. Judging by the cavalcade of happy faces bouncing along to ‘Close To You’, there should be a nice supportive energy awaiting her on Glasgow Green.

Gracie Abrams was reviewed at OVO Hydro, Glasgow.