“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.
