Grace Ives has spent the past several years turning archetypal formats—the nursery rhyme, the ringtone, the 9 to 5—into a repertoire of oblique pop standards so well-crafted they belie the personal chaos inside them. She trades in stories of glamorous disarray, all bruised egos and Irish exits and rambling thoughts. By Ives’ own estimation, she spent the three years after the release of her 2022 breakthrough, Janky Star, crashing out: drinking too much, pushing people away, falling down, etc. Eventually, she ditched booze, made for Los Angeles, and learned to drive, soundtracking her rides with Peter Gabriel, Mitski, and her personal top-ranked song of all time, Kesha’s “Die Young.”
It tracks that Girlfriend, her resplendent and refreshingly self-serious new album, came together during this period: its cumulative effect is of belting to the radio in your car. Girlfriend scales the diaristic, bric-a-brac charm of Janky Star into a high-drama pop monument to trying, flopping, and trying even harder next time. Working in step with eternal Jack Antonoff mogger Ariel Rechstaid and John DeBold, Ives leans into the vaudevillian charm of her early work, making the minuscule feel major: pump organs and glockenspiels, channeling the disheveled cool of “Everything Is Embarrassing” into a tragicomic trainwreck.
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In a moment when much pop music sounds engineered for minimum friction, Ives’ smudgy postcards from the edge constitute a real revelation. Eventually, I started to read Girlfriend’s title not as an identifying noun but as a sympathetic admonishment to a sloppy friend, like: “Girlfriend… really?” Ives recognizes that sometimes, the only way to keep on trucking is an honest shrug: Well, that happened. “What If?”—tonally situated somewhere between Miley Cyrus’ “See You Again” and Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee”—turns on a dime from teasing to contrition. On “Garden,” she accepts the end of an era, reminding herself she’s “lucky to be free from the hell of my pride” in a breathy, burbling register best described as tear-stained. Girlfriend runs on Ives’ ragged and muscular alto, which has the timbre of a lounge singer and the texture of kintsugi.
Girlfriend synthesizes the sensation of abandon with remarkable clarity, a testament to Ives’ top-to-bottom skillset, trained over years of chopping it up at home with a 505 sequencer. Opener “Now I,” picks you up like a hitchhiker, flitting from the ocean to the open road on the wings of Ives’ higher register. From here on out, the cool-girl leaves the building and it’s bless-this-mess o’clock. “Avalanche,” adapted from a ringtone Ives released on Bandcamp in 2017, whips blustery fills and pianoplinks into the sound of a walking natural disaster its narrator embodies. “I want, want, want, and I take, take, take, feeling sorry not sorry for the mess that I make,” Ives mutters, dodging the beat’s scattered eruptions in the nick of time. On “Dance With Me,” she begs a humdrum beau to “come out and play” like Mimi Marquez hanging off a fire escape, in search of a quick fix for the “weight of the world.”
