At the splintered edge where faith meets fallout, punk artist Grace Graber starts her story over. “Everything You Ever Wanted,” her new EP, is less confession than confrontation: a woman standing in the post-burnout silence, gathering her wits and her wounds, and daring to name what cost her most. The record, now streaming everywhere, is a minor miracle in the Christian alt-rock scene, as bracing as it is vulnerable—a document of a year that nearly undid its creator, and a signal flare for listeners who find themselves somewhere between hope, heartbreak, and sheer exhaustion.
For Graber, the idea of “everything you ever wanted” was never about high-gloss aspiration. It was a real and slightly menacing question she was forced to swallow during a season that, by every outside measure, should have been her breakthrough. She was the indie darling with a devoted fan base, the punk songwriter balancing raw confessions with slicing hooks. Yet as 2024 bled into 2025, she found herself rationing energy, re-negotiating purpose, and running headlong into the concrete wall of burnout.
“Pressure” is the song that appears earliest in her timeline of collapse. Graber describes it without much bravado—she just reached a point, early that year, where everything started slipping away. “You’re singing these hopeful lines on stage while inside you’re barely holding it together,” she recalls. The tension in the music—tight drums, elegiac vocals—mirrors a young woman at the end of her rope. “Pressure” is both an anthem and a cry, encapsulating the dissonance between purpose and capacity, expectation and reality. It’s a song born at the collision point between calling and collapse.
But there’s another force at work here, beneath the exhaustion, and that’s faith—albeit less the triumphant faith of the worship stage, and more the ragged, late-night variety of those who find themselves talking quietly to God in the darkness. Graber’s willingness to admit first to herself, then to her growing audience, that faith doesn’t always feel victorious sets her apart within Christian music. “Better Now,” she says, is evidence of her honesty. Written during a week when she’d just returned to antidepressants and found “healing” elusive, she questioned the gap between the freedom promised in Jesus and the hard, messy work of survival.
Graber is part of a rising generation of faith-based artists who refuse to gloss over pain—an attitude resonating across a Christian music scene newly alert to the urgency of mental health advocacy (as discussed by a chorus of artists in CCM Magazine)[https://www.ccmmagazine.com/news/faith-in-the-fire-christian-artists-illuminate-mental-health-awareness/]. The movement is unmistakable. Songs of peace and recovery, once relegated to the margins, are now central to Christian music playlists, with writers and listeners alike testifying to music’s ability to soothe—sometimes even to save—those in the throes of anxiety and depression (KHCB)[https://khcb.org/khcb/how-christian-music-can-lift-your-spirit-uplifted-life/]; (Soothing Christian Music)[https://open.spotify.com/playlist/155y2uKFqmfapUtkGEPLZT].
That spiritual nuance—God in the little things, not just the miracles—threads through Graber’s recent writing. When she talks about the grace that began to seep back into her life, she mentions “my marriage, my kitchen table, my solitude,” not just the big stage or public affirmation. This subtle recalibration of what counts as victory—shifting from perfection to presence, from applause to intimacy—feels hard-won. Graber’s year was shaped by “slow, steady growth,” a countercultural rhythm for an artist pressured to go viral or disappear.
By the time she wrote “Run,” Graber was both raw and self-aware. The song is a study in tension: knowing in your head what you should believe, feeling that truth hasn’t quite landed in your body yet. She admits, “The cracks started to show.” Years of touring and hustling as an independent artist had caught up to her—an experience shared by many in the music industry as the aftershocks of pandemic-era uncertainty linger (Gospel Music Association)[https://gospelmusic.org/soundmind]. When she was finally asked, “Is this everything you ever wanted?” she let the mask slip and answered plainly: she was not okay, but she believed with everything in her that she was meant for this life.
The release of “Everything You Ever Wanted” is, in many ways, a ritual of letting go. Graber’s decision to open up—to “get still, just me and God,” as she puts it—wasn’t simply about healing herself. It was about trusting that her honesty could carve space for someone else’s survival too. In an age where Christian artists are increasingly asked to address mental health head-on, her music lands harder for its refusal to offer simple answers.
Graber’s producers on the EP—Brandon Moser, Blake Cross, and Jackson Scott—bring their own creative fingerprints to the project. Moser, a worship leader and songwriter with roots in Sonoma County, California, has produced for artists at the crossroads of faith, soul, and authenticity, making him a natural collaborator for Graber’s emotionally charged sound (Instagram)[https://www.instagram.com/brandonmosermusic/]. Cross, an LA-based multi-instrumentalist and DJ, infuses the arrangements with a restless energy, bridging indie rock and electronic texture (Blake Cross Music)[http://www.blakecrossmusic.com/bio]. Jackson Scott, for his part, is known for his genre-blurring work and introspective approach, lending a layered, atmospheric touch that anchors Graber’s vocals at the center of the storm.
Together, they’ve crafted an EP that feels as intimate as a diary and as volatile as a prayer. The songs, especially the title track—a cover of Hawk Nelson’s “Everything You Ever Wanted,” reimagined with Audiophile—stand as testaments to the sacredness of struggle. To Graber, the symbolism runs deep: covering a song about longing and legacy in the middle of her own reckoning gives new meaning to the question that first haunted her.
As the dust settles, Graber is clear-eyed about what music has cost her, but also what it’s given back. “God didn’t waste my pain,” she insists. “He gave me back my hope—in the music, and in myself.” That hope doesn’t arrive as a torrent, but as a trickle—enough to begin again, enough to meet the old doubts with new, steadier courage. Graber’s story, chronicled across “Everything You Ever Wanted,” is not one of triumph, but of honesty and the stubborn determination to continue.
Fans and new listeners can find her EP everywhere music streams, and follow her ongoing journey through her official portal (Grace Graber Music)[https://linktr.ee/gracegrabermusic]. The sound is unmistakably her own: punk on the outside, contemplative and searching at the core. Each track on the EP offers an invitation—to acknowledge the pressure, survive the seasons of slow growth, and recognize the flickers of grace hiding in the smallest moments.
As the sharp edges of the year begin to blunt, Graber stands with her grief and her gratitude in equal measure. The old question—“Is this everything you ever wanted?”—has no simple answer, but at least now she knows she is not alone in wrestling with it. “The healing’s not over,” she says, voice steady with the kind of hard-won faith that’s not afraid to admit its own fragility. “But this is part of it.”
In a year when many artists retreated from the glare or lost their voices altogether, Graber gave us hers—unfiltered, unguarded, and unmistakably alive. If you listen closely, you’ll hear it: the pulse of a heart learning how to be whole, even when hope is a whisper chased in the dark.
Links
- CCM Magazine — Faith in the Fire
- KHCB — How Christian Music Can Lift Your Spirit
- Spotify — Soothing Christian Music
- GMA — Sound Mind
- Grace Graber Music — Linktree
- Instagram — Brandon Moser
- Blake Cross — bio
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