Small Stage, Gracie Abrams Plays Irving Plaza a Week Before SNL

Irving Place runs only a few blocks north from 14th Street. On Saturday night, one of the biggest voices in pop plays a room there that most of her fans will never get into.

Gracie Abrams headlines the SiriusXM Small Stage Series at Irving Plaza on October 24, in a show presented by Hershey's. The club at 17 Irving Place is a standing room built for bands on their way up. Abrams has spent the last few years in much bigger rooms, including stadium nights opening for Taylor Swift.

A Night Without a Box Office

There is no public on-sale. SiriusXM gave tickets away to subscribers and fans through a sweepstakes, and its entry page now says the contest has ended. Irving Plaza's own calendar skips straight from October 23 to October 26.

The radio company says she will play songs from Daughter from Hell, her third album, along with older favorites. The series has a long guest list behind it. SiriusXM names Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, Green Day, Alicia Keys, Lainey Wilson and Kenny Chesney among the acts that have played it before.

Everyone else gets the tape. The full concert airs on SiriusXM Hits 1, channel 2, on Friday, October 30 at 9 p.m., Saturday, October 31 at 3 p.m. and Sunday, November 1 at 7 p.m., all Eastern. It will also stream on the SiriusXM app, and select songs go to The Pulse, Unwell Music and The Coffee House.

The Record She Brings

Daughter from Hell came out July 17 on Interscope. Abrams produced it with Aaron Dessner, her longtime collaborator. "Hit the Wall" arrived in May as the lead single and "Look at My Life" followed in June.

The guest list is quiet but notable. NME's review credits Justin Vernon on "Hit the Wall" and "Humming," Marcus Mumford on "What If It's Right?" and Paul Mescal as a co-writer on "Imaginary Friend."

Critics split on it. In Rolling Stone's review, Angie Martoccio framed a third album as a make-or-break moment for any artist and called this one her best album yet. She heard the title track, a thank-you to Abrams's mother wrapped in an apology for a hard teenage stretch, as "a raw, devastating rocker" unlike anything else in her catalog.

"More plodding than enlightened."

That was NME's Rhian Daly, who heard an artist looking back at her younger self from a steadier place and found the songs slow to land. Most of the notices sit somewhere between those two.

She has been building to this for a while. Born in Los Angeles in 1999 to the filmmaker J.J. Abrams and the producer Katie McGrath, she released her first album, Good Riddance, in February 2023, the same year she opened selected Eras Tour dates. Swift brought her back for more North American shows in late 2024.

The stakes were high either way. Her second album, The Secret of Us, debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 in 2024, and its single "That's So True" climbed to No. 6 on the Hot 100. She was nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys in 2024, and again the next year for "Us," her duet with Swift.

Studio 8H on Halloween

Irving Plaza is the warm-up for a bigger room, and a stranger one. Abrams is the musical guest on the October 31 Saturday Night Live, the Halloween episode, with Inde Navarrette hosting, according to JoBlo. Suite 646 has been tracking the fall season from the Shane Gillis night onward.

After that the arenas come back. Her Look at My Life Tour is scheduled to run from December into March 2027. A film career is waiting too. In January she was announced for her first acting role, in Please, an A24 film from the director Halina Reijn.

What to Know Before You Go

Unless you won the sweepstakes, you are not going. The show is Saturday, October 24 at Irving Plaza, 17 Irving Place at East 15th Street, and the broadcast starts the following Friday at 9 p.m. on SiriusXM Hits 1.

The Halloween SNL airs October 31 at 11:30 p.m. on NBC and streams live on Peacock.

The sweepstakes winners get the small stage. Everyone else gets the radio on Friday night, and Studio 8H the next.