Meet Audrey Hobert: Gracie Abrams’ Best Friend And Collaborator Announces Her Australian Tour
To say Audrey Hobert has had a massive couple of years would be an understatement.
Three years ago, she was just a regular girl who went to work during the day and hung out with her best friend and roommate at night. Only that day job was as a staff writer for the Nickelodeon series The Really Loud House, and that best friend and roommate was Gracie Abrams, and the “hanging out” was actually co-writing songs for Abrams’ second album, The Secret Of Us.
Since then, she’s left the writers’ room to release her solo debut album, Who’s The Clown?, in August, and today announced that she’ll take it on a headlining world tour, landing in Australia and New Zealand in May 2026.
When ELLE meets Hobert, now 26, in Sydney, she’s only been in the country for about 26 hours. She’s travelled 15 hours from Los Angeles, “the furthest I’ve ever been from home”, to play two intimate gigs in Sydney and Melbourne before heading back to the Northern Hemisphere to take her tour on the road across the UK, Europe and the US, until she gets to Auckland early next year and then returns to Australia for shows in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.
Audrey Hobert; courtesy of Sony Music.
Being a musician was never really on the cards for Hobert, despite growing up in a creative and musical household, loving theatre and playing the piano. It was writing that was her passion: after high school, she studied screenwriting at New York University and started to take in her writer-and-producer father’s footsteps when she joined the writers’ room for The Really Loud House.
“During that time, Gracie and I moved in together and then we sort of naturally started writing songs,” she says. After work each day, she’d come home to sit on the porch with Abrams, where they’d play guitar (Hobert is self-taught) and sing whatever lyrics came to mind. It was the first time Hobert thought to take music seriously, even though a lot of the lyrics they came up with were jokes at first. Hobert ended up being an integral part of seven tracks on Abrams’ second album, The Secret Of Us, including “That’s So True”, “Risk”, and “I Love You, I’m Sorry”.
Hobert also wrote songs with her brother Malcolm Todd, who went viral on TikTok for his 2023 singles “Art House” and “Roommates” before releasing his eponymous debut album this year.
“It wasn’t like I was actively making any decision to switch over [to music], it was just kind of laid down in front of me, and it was up to me whether or not I wanted to go down that path,” she says. “From the second I started writing songs, I knew that I loved it. I’ve always loved pop music specifically, and I’ve always loved to write.”
Thanks to her collaborations with Abrams, Hobert signed a publishing deal for her music. “And then the show I was working on got cancelled, so it all led seamlessly into each other,” she says. “I figured I’d just grab the bull by the horns. It felt like I was in the right place in my life, and I felt like I would be doing a disservice to myself not to go for it. I knew every moment I questioned whether or not I deserved it or if I was good enough, would be a moment of life wasted.”
Audrey Hobert; courtesy of Sony Music
When Abrams’ headed off on her global tour for the album, Hobert couldn’t stop the songs from coming. In a feverish eight months, she wrote her own album, Who’s The Clown?, an homage to 2000s pop and coming-of-age movie soundtracks. There are songs about hooking up with exes (and why you shouldn’t hook up with exes), relating to Phoebe Buffay from Friends, and feeling out of place at fancy parties.
Hobert skipped the usual EP before LP rollout, opting instead to release a full studio album. “When I started, I had a chunk of songs written, and there was a moment when there was going to be an EP because I wanted to put something out sooner rather than later,” she says. “But once I signed with a recording label, I knew I wanted it to be all or nothing, so I thought, I’m just going to go for an album. It also makes me happy to know that there’s one body of work to my name.
“An album also brings you back to a time that I don’t entirely remember but I know existed, of Walkmans and record players,” she adds. “I like that feeling.”
That body of work includes all the visuals for Who’s The Clown?, of which Hobert had full creative control: she edited and directed the videos for her singles, including “Sue Me” and “Bowling Alley”. “‘Sue Me’ was an early song, and I knew I wanted it to me by first song, and I just saw myself dancing in three separate rooms for that video, and then for ‘Bowling Alley’, that one kind of just wrote itself, but I knew I wanted to shoot on film and have references to ‘Baby’ by Justin Bieber.”
Audrey Hobert; courtesy of Sony Music
As Hobert moves away from being a musician’s secret weapon to a star in her own right, she’s also forging a niche for herself among the greatest of the pop girlies. Where Abrams has a hold over diary-like confessionals, Sabrina Carpenter is Hollywood glamour with a wink, Chappell Roan is 2025’s queer pop icon, Addison Rae is bringing back the unashamedly fame-hungry dance popstar, and Charli xcx has unruly behaviour more than covered, Hobert’s niche is humour: not like comedian-with-a-guitar-trying-for-laughs humour, but a more subtle brand of word play and lyrical intricacy that rewards re-listens.
How will she translate this to the stage? This week, she’ll be “a girl with a guitar” when she plays intimate gigs at The Lansdowne in Sydney and The Toff in Melbourne. But for The Staircase To Stardom Tour, she’ll tap into her theatre origins to put on a proper show. “I never saw myself as like the girl with the guitar, but I am. It is how I wrote all these songs, and it is part of who I am as an artist,” she says, “so I’m grateful to have gotten to perform in that way, but I’m very ready to, like, put on a show.”
Audrey Hobert’s The Staircase To Stardom Tour kicks off in the US in December, and will reach Australia and New Zealand in May 2026. For dates and tickets, see frontiertouring.com
