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In the fall of 2023, Grace Ives returned home to New York. After spending most of the previous year touring her critically acclaimed second album, Janky Star, within a matter of weeks she found herself—for lack of a better term—crashing out. In a remarkably candid letter accompanying the musician’s latest three singles—released under the tongue-in-cheek title of, well, Singles—Ives recounts the period that followed: hitting rock bottom; crying and vomiting; “drinking, lying, and hiding.” While Ives had been candid in the past about her difficult relationship with alcohol and drugs, things had reached a new low.
“It’s so crazy,” she tells me, clearly on the other side of that turbulent period. She’s sitting, fresh-faced and with cotton candy-pink hair, in the home office of her Brooklyn apartment, surrounded by bric-à-brac. “Even just trying to close my eyes and think about what happened… it feels like I wasn’t myself. It doesn’t feel like a true part of me, or who I am right now.” She likens the experience of being holed up at home to water sitting still for too long: “things just got stagnant and murky and disgusting.”
“I stopped working and performing and didn’t have to be in the studio, and I wasn t taking care of myself,” Ives goes on. So how does she feel today? “I feel like I’m just now realizing what my life is—or just now feeling like I’m living a real life,” she replies, before breaking into a smile. “It’s a little like opening all the windows in the house and letting the fresh air come in.”
You can hear it in the music. In lieu of the hyperactive, tightly wound tracks on Janky Star—like pop songs bitten off in chunks and chewed up into strangely elegant new forms—the first track of the three released last week, “Avalanche,” lands with an epic sweep. “I want, want, want and I take, take, take / Feeling sorry not sorry for the mess that I make,” she sings over a frenzied, ping-ponging beat before launching into a thrilling chorus packed with thundering piano chords, Enya-like synth stabs, and Ives giving it all she’s got vocally.
The song is accompanied by a delightful video of Ives road-tripping through the California desert—dancing in front of the Trona Pinnacles, doing karaoke through the window of a seedy bar, singing in the darkness of a motel room illuminated by a cheap disco light, and dangling an alien figurine out the window of a speeding car. “It has a sense of humor, I think, which is important,” says Ives of the visual. “I can feel so serious when I’m writing. My music is really serious to me. And I think that’s another thing that’s different this time around: I’m like, ‘I’m not fucking around in my bedroom anymore. This is my life, so let’s take it seriously.’ But it’s nice to have those moments, like the video, where I remember that making things can be light and fun.”
Where Ives is often described as a bedroom pop artist—a labeling that is partly just factual, given the majority of Ives’s previous music was written with a Roland MC-505 and a guitar at home, before being taken to a studio to be “beefed up,” in her words—the new songs point towards something bolder and more expansive, like she’s finally opening her music (and herself) up to the world. “That more spacious sound also came about through needing to have a bigger life,” she explains. “I needed to have a more full life. It can’t just be me. I’m not the center of the universe.”
Immediately after her life in New York came crashing down around her, Ives headed for Los Angeles, where she spent much of last year working on the material that she’s now releasing—and which points towards a third, as-yet-unannounced, album. She recalls spending much of her early weeks there in libraries around the city. Reading and just sitting with herself, she realized that being productive doesn’t always have to mean actually making things. “I can so easily be like, ‘Man, I didn’t do anything today. I didn’t work on anything,’ and beat myself up over that. I think I really had to keep in the spirit of just getting out of the house, and exploring this new uncharted territory, and being around people who are on their laptops doing God knows what.”
Eventually, Ives joined forces with the cult-favorite producer Ariel Rechtshaid to begin writing a new record in earnest, and inevitably, the dramatic changes that had taken place in her life were reflected in the music she was making—not just lyrically, but also in terms of their scale and ambition. Working out of a studio packed with an array of weird and wonderful instruments, she played them all—a Mellotron, a tack piano, two different kinds of organs—and let that noodling inform the direction of the songs.
Vocally, too, she felt emboldened to head into new territory. On past records, Ives’s hushed, husky voice has been dialed down to a whisper, or twisted into something almost abstract. Now, on “Dance With Me,” she lets her voice glide and swoop with a silky flutter, firmly at the front of the mix, while on “My Mans,” she launches into a full-on belt in the chorus, evoking the drama of an ’80s power ballad.
“I think the old me would’ve cringed at it a bit,” she says. “Oh, you’re actually trying to sing. How embarrassing! But now I’m like, well, why wouldn’t I?” She remembers being in the studio with Rechtshaid, working on “My Mans,” and telling him, “‘This sounds so big and dramatic. What are we doing?’ And Ariel was like, ‘This is the song that you wrote. It’s this. And listen to how you’re singing it. You’re belting, it’s your ballad. Shut up. Enjoy it.’” She breaks into a hearty laugh. “That was cool.”
It’s in keeping with a wider lesson Ives has learned and is now putting into practice. Instead of waiting for things to get better, she’s making it her responsibility to change the things that aren’t serving her. “In therapy, I was talking about how I really struggle with self-promotion. I think I have this weird thing where I associate promoting myself with arrogance, and I have shame around that. And my therapist was like, ‘Dude, you’re bad at self-promoting in general.’ I’ve stayed at horrible jobs where I’m being completely mistreated and I’m like, ‘It’s okay!’ And everyone’s like, ‘Girl, quit.’ That kind of self-promotion, too, I find uncomfortable. But I’ve realized the antidote to that is actually just doing it. And I need to keep doing that now that I’m taking this seriously and I’m taking my quality of life seriously. And it’s helpful. Sharing myself is helpful—to me, and hopefully to other people.”
It’s a valid instinct, though one that doesn’t necessarily come naturally to her: Even over the course of our interview, I can sense her hold back, and then realizing it’s healthier to let it all spill out. “This, right now, is the first time I’ve talked about my music in, like, two years,” she acknowledges at one point, after struggling to think of an answer right off the bat. “It’s a little surreal, because I haven’t done it in so long.”
If the caliber of Ives’s new music is anything to go by, there will be plenty of new heights to scale on the self-promotion front. “These songs definitely feel like the start of something totally new. I think that you can feel in these songs that there is something bigger happening—there’s more life and more energy. I think that when I listen to them, I can feel that.” I reassure her that, as a listener, one can feel it too—and that I’d like to picture her finishing our conversation, shutting the laptop lid, and going over to throw her windows open, ready to receive that invigorating rush of fresh air.
