ABRA

Biography

Gabrielle Olivia Mirville (born March 30, 1989), known professionally as Abra (stylized as ABRA), is an American singer and songwriter. She is currently signed to Polo Grounds Music and RCA Records, and was formerly signed to Awful Records.

Early life and education

Abra was born in Queens, New York to missionary parents from Guyana and Haiti. Abra spent her first eight years in London, where her parents built the church they would ultimately work in. Her introduction to singing came from that church, too, where her father was pastor and her mother oversaw praise and worship. After London, her family settled in the suburb of Lilburn outside Atlanta.
At 14, Abra began playing guitar. She attended Parkview High School and was an active member of the drama department, graduating in 2007.

Career

Later in her teens, she began uploading her acoustic covers of rap songs onto YouTube. This led to her being discovered by Awful Records founder and rapper Father, who encouraged her to make original music. She joined the label in 2014, later expressing that her early experiences with Awful Records were a source of inspiration for her, describing the experience as "the battery in my back."
Her first EP, BLQ Velvet×BLQ Velvet25 February 2015 · EPSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 6 tracks1U Go I Go5:422Make It3:533Unwise4:314I Guess4:465Fade 2 Blaq4:236Love & Power4:23, was released in 2015. Her second EP, Princess×Princess15 July 2016 · EPSpotifyYouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 6 tracks1Come 4 Me1:022Vegas5:213Crybaby5:124Big Boi2:535Pull Up2:596Thinking of U4:46 was released by True Panther Sounds on July 15, 2016. It is her first release on a major label. The song "Fruit" off the album Rose was featured in an article on the best R&B songs of 2016 by The Guardian.
Regarding Abra's style of clothing, Vogue commented in 2016 that "deliberate contrasts are part of her artistic identity on the whole: Abra is a member of the mostly male-dominated Awful Records coterie, an outlier crew swiftly taking over Atlanta with a sound that stands apart from ATL's rap oeuvre".
Abra is one of the stars of the 2018 film Assassination Nation and plays Em. She later described the experience as incredibly labor-intensive, requiring significant amounts of work to produce even the smallest scenes. She compared the work to grape treading, "stomping on all these grapes to make a little [bottle] of wine."
In 2023, she released her single "FKA MESS×FKA MESS30 March 2023 · SingleSpotifyYouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 1 track1FKA MESS6:02", which was described as a "six-minute experimental pop excursion" by The Fader.

Musical style

Dazed characterized Abra's early work as featuring "often-looming, bass-heavy production, laced with hypnotically melodic and vulnerable lyricism", noting that her work has featured elements of trap music, electronic music, and rhythm and blues.

Remixes

Empress Of – Standard (ABRA Remix) (2015)
Father – Everybody In The Club (ABRA Remix) (2015)