LIVE REVIEW: GRACIE ABRAMS AT UNIPOL FORUM, MILAN 25/02/2025

Gracie Abrams at iHeartRadio’s Jingle Ball 2024 / Copyright: Getty Images - Kevin Mazur

It is a grey and rainy day on the outskirts of Milan, Italy, as a crowd of bow wearing girls with their friends, parents and partners dance and sing along to playbacks of Ariana Grande’s “We Can’t Be Friends” and Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe” while they wait for the main event to start.

Gracie Abrams, class of 1999, appears right on time on an elevated stage, half hidden as she fittingly opens her show with “Felt Good About You”, the first track off her second studio album, The Secret Of Us.

Her joy is infectious as she greets the crowd after the first songs - “Risk” and “Blowing Smoke” off the new album and fan favourite “21” from her 2020 EP, Minor. As she will end up doing several times throughout the show, she singles out fans who have gifts and letters for her, accepting them and making sure to talk to and thank each of them individually, and even recognising some from past interactions, before moving on with the rest of the setlist.

She goes on to play both piano and guitar as well as moving around the stage with simply her microphone, her band always behind her, as she waves at all sides of the stadium, with over 15.000 people in the crowd singing and waving back at her.

While Abrams performs the last line of the chorus from her single “Tough Love”, “But I know now what I'm leavin' for”, she literally leaves the main stage to walk right into the standing crowd, to a bed which seems to have materialised right in the middle of the pit. A bed that is a perfect replica of Abrams’ own, one long time fans would recognise from her “Bedroom Shows” that she would perform through zoom during the pandemic, and the place where she wrote most of her songs.

Here, she once again interacts with fans, taking pictures and videos with their phones and she even takes out her own camera to take pictures of the crowd herself.

The singer admits, as she is not feeling well, she did have to cut some songs from the setlist - this author is mourning the loss of “Mess It Up” and “I Know It Won’t Work” from previous dates particularly.

But, as a true Tay Daughter, Abrams does take a page off Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour (which she opened for a whopping 49 times), performing not only a surprise song - “Best”, off her previous and first album Good Riddance - but also debuting a brand new song called “Cold Goodbyes”.

Although always giving a remarkable performance, Abrams does also keep track of what’s happening in the crowd, not only for people wanting to hand her flowers, handmade crochet bags and books, but also for fans feeling unwell, which unfortunately does happen a few times, but is always spotted by the artist, the fans getting help right away.

She closes the part of the set on the B stage - B as in Bedroom -, saying that “for a million and a half reasons, I will never forget this show”, and goes on to wrap up with two of her bigger hits: “That’s So True”, with its wordy, fast paced, incredibly fun to sing along to bridge, and finally her upbeat single “Close To You”, with the crowd forming dancing circles in the pit as they say goodbye.

Full setlist below:

1. Felt Good About You

2. Risk

3. Blowing Smoke

4. 21

5. I Love You, I’m Sorry

6. Where Do We Go Now?

7. Gave You I Gave You I

8. Rockland

9. Normal Thing

10. I Told You Things

11. Let It Happen

12. Best

13. Cold Goodbyes

14. I Miss You, I’m Sorry

15. us.

16. Free Now

17. That’s So True

18. Close To You