“Baby, It was quite the scene when I drank… I tanked,” sings Grace Ives on her third album, Girlfriend. It’s a record that sees New York’s indie darling unpack the mess of her drinking years over her trademark jingly-jangly synth-pop sounds. Whispered confessions of shame, reckless yelps of denial and the yearning for a fresh start jostle with giddy crescendos of elegant strings, burbling keyboards, wonky samples and prettily plucked acoustic guitars. Imagine an AA meeting in which a motley crew of participants express themselves with a Roland MC-505 and you’re about there.
Endearingly – and in keeping with Ives’s need for direct communication – she wrote her own press release to accompany the record. In it, she tells us that Girlfriend is this story of a “crash out” that ended in “hospital bills galore”. ”I fell down stairs,” she writes. “I called out sick; I stole; I was a s****y girlfriend, a bad daughter; I abandoned the few friends I had; I cried and vomited beyond bile. Gross.” Neither the carnage nor the blunt acknowledgement of it will come as a surprise to fans of her breakthrough second album, 2022’s Janky Star, on which she sang about the time she fainted while doing yoga: “Oh, what a loser sound/I let out when I hit the ground.” Having been with the same boyfriend her whole life, Ives moved to LA alone to make Girlfriend. You can hear the wide-open Californian skies opening up around her, in the more spacious passages of this record.
So on “My Man”, which builds from a delicate, doo-dat piano tune to a swelling synth anthem, she describes periods of solitary reflection walking her dogs, taking lonesome drives and carving her name into tree bark. The chorus is a howl of questioning ambiguity: “Tell me where I lost my way completely/ I’d be his shadow just to have his back/ Every single guy I meet completes me/ I need a lover who can love me back.” The belter of a single, “Stupid Bitches”, finds her begging for “kindness over honesty” over a cascade of ravey synth chord liberation, and a chorus where she pleads, “Don’t hurt me any more”. There are echoes of t.A.T.u’s 2002 hit “All The Things She Said” in the explosive confusion of it.
Elsewhere, you might catch little ripples of Enya in the splashy electropulse of “Avalanche” and volcanic echoes of Bjork’s “Human Behaviour” on “Neither U Nor I”, where Ives describes a pain “hot like a knife/ Stab in my chubby side”. Sometimes these new songs do leave you yearning for the tracks that inspired them instead of wanting more of Ives. But the warmth of her soft, feathery vocal keeps you hooked. That vocal is often semi-sunk in the mix, although it rises to the surface over the swaying hip-hop beat of “Drink Up” and blasts through “What If”.
One of the issues that can prevent artists with addiction problems from sobering up is the fear that, should they find inner equilibrium, the wild corners of their creativity will be filed off. But Ives proves you can quit the chemicals and hang on to some distinctive chaos. In fact, she sounds braver than ever here, scratching her itch for highs with sound itself. She tries her hand at new instruments and darts boldly between genres. As a consequence, Girlfriend can be a hard record to get a grip on. But it’s the ideal album for anyone else on the comedown from 2025’s Brat summer who now yearns, with Ives, to be “drinking up the day”.
