The possibility that primordial black holes constitute a fraction of dark matter motivates a detailed study of possible mechanisms for their production. Black holes can form by the collapse of primordial curvature fluctuations, if the amplitude of their small scale spectrum gets amplified by several orders of magnitude with respect to CMB scales. Such enhancement can for example occur in single-field inflation that exhibit a transient non-attractor phase: in this work, we make a detailed investigation of the shape of the curvature spectrum in this scenario. We make use of an analytical approach based on a gradient expansion of curvature perturbations, which allows us to follow the changes in slope of the spectrum during its way from large to small scales. After encountering a dip in its amplitude, the spectrum can acquire steep slopes with a spectral index up to $n_s-1,=,8$, to then relax to a more gentle growth with $n_s-1,lesssim,3$ towards its peak, in agreement with the results found in previous literature. For scales following the peak associated with the presence of the non-attractor phase, the spectrum amplitude then mildly decays, during a transitional stage from non-attractor back to attractor evolution. Our analysis indicates that this gradient approach offers a transparent understanding of the contributions controlling the slope of the curvature spectrum. As an application of our findings, we characterise the slope in frequency of a stochastic gravitational wave background generated at second order from curvature fluctuations, using the more accurate information we gained on the shape of curvature power spectrum.
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