Gracie Abrams Mixes “Extra-Dirty” Gin Martinis—and Shares the Story Behind Her New Album

Reported by Vogue.

Gracie Abrams is Vogue's summer 2026 cover star, and she's celebrating the way she knows best: with a bracingly filthy gin martini and a pan of French braised leeks. According to Vogue, the singer appeared on the publication's Now Serving video series to cook, mix drinks, and quietly reveal what the making of her third album actually looked like from the inside.

That album — Daughter from Hell, out July 17 — was born out of a London winter and a long-overdue return to a kitchen. "It just puts me in a meditative state," Abrams says of cooking, describing how comfort food became a ritual during recording sessions. After an extended stretch on tour without access to her own space, the act of making something warm and edible wasn't just domestic pleasure — it was creative fuel.

Going Deeper, Not Differently

Working again with co-producer and co-writer Aaron Dessner, Abrams says she learned that reinvention for its own sake wasn't the move. Instead, she went inward — back to childhood, back to her "inherent sound and calling" — and made a record she describes as a portrait of being in your twenties: that specific, disorienting in-between. "I felt like I was able to be really present for it," she says. The absence of touring made that possible. So did talking to writer Brittany Spanos for the cover story, even if Abrams admits the vulnerability of press still makes her nervous.

The martini, at least, has no such hesitation. Abrams makes hers aggressively dirty — extra olive brine, no apologies — adding more to the shaker after the first pour didn't look cloudy enough. "I like it to taste like the ocean," she says. The leeks, Corre Larkin's braised recipe, earned a 10 out of 10 from the Vogue team after Abrams pulled them from the oven and did a small, victorious jump.

There's something genuinely telling about a cover story where the most revealing moments happen over a stovetop — the new album, the controlled chaos of early adulthood, and a martini that breaks the rules on purpose all add up to the same thesis: Gracie Abrams knows exactly what she wants, and she's done being subtle about it.

Read the original at Vogue.