Grace Ives is proud to be embarrassed

Ringtone crashouts, bric-a-brac expanse, and homebody anthems have made Ives a compelling frontrunner in this current phase of indie-pop, positing her as the high-drama, cry-your-eyes-out-singing midpoint between Sky Ferreira and Addison Rae.

By Matt Mitchell | March 20, 2026 | 12:00pm

Photo by Maddy Rottman

Music Features Grace Ives

The three years that separated Janky Star and Grace Ives’ return felt like a hundred. There’s not a pop record from this decade that I care about more than Janky Star. “Shelly”! “On the Ground”!! “LULLABY”!!! Oh, my God. The check I sent in to renew my Grace Ives Fan Club membership cashed when “Avalanche,” “Dance With Me,” and “My Mans” dropped in November. And when her publicist sent those songs to my inbox, the email came with a letter written by Ives attached, where she admits to being a shitty girlfriend and a bad daughter. She admits to lying, stealing, crying, vomiting beyond bile, falling down the stairs, and abandoning what few friends he had left.

But Ives didn’t intend for everyone to know she hit rock bottom, or about what paths addiction had sent her down. She wrote that letter figuring it wouldn’t appear in a press release. “And that’s my bad,” she says, “because I’m sure everybody told me that it would.” But the letter wasn’t a totally bad thing. Ives has been in a “transparent, honest mode” ever since getting the hell out of Brooklyn, which had become suffocating, and holing up in libraries across Los Angeles, penning her third album, Girlfriend, without intending to. She only wants to tell the truth now. “And, sure, obviously protect myself and be kind to myself,” she adds, “but I think that I shared that because, maybe, somebody could relate to it.”

She’s not talking about Citi-biking on ketamine or spending $400 on drinks in interviews anymore. The things Ives said on the record are stuck on the internet forever, and even her friends and family couldn’t believe that any of it was true or that she’d faced consequences, but she’s in “true sober kid mode” now. There’ll be no apology tour, no PR face-lift. Anxiety and sadness, she says, are still there, “but I’m less harmful as a person. I’ve released some shame, if you will.” She frames it like Girlfriend allowed her to grow up again, allowing her “to be with my feet on the ground,” as she tells it on “Garden.” We agree it’s like peeling glue off of your hand, or drawing on your arms in pen ink.

Ringtone crashouts, bric-a-brac expanse, and homebody anthems have made Ives a compelling frontrunner in this current phase of indie-pop, positing her as the high-drama, cry-your-eyes-out-singing midpoint between Sky Ferreira and Addison Rae. Girlfriend should be a remedy for all this bro-country, half-baked reggaeton, and TikTok-audio slop-generated chart malaise. After years of worshipping Kesha’s “Die Young,” Ives now has one of her own in “Drink Up.” Janky Star put her in magazines and bigger rooms. I bring that up and Ives responds in guarded disbelief. “When you say that, I’m like, I don’t know what you’re referring to. I mean, you’re obviously right, but.” Ives isn’t used to being proud of herself, and she tells me as much. Don’t get me wrong, she’s definitely playing her songs back and telling herself, “This is the shit,” and she sings “Drunk in Love” to me just to prove it. “I know what I’m doing is really good, but I’m not gonna say it out loud. Around the time of Janky Star, I didn’t believe anything said about how good it was.” Four years later, Ives thinks that record is amazing. “My therapist’s impression of me is ‘I want everybody to love me, but not too much.’”

BUT TO GET A REAL SENSE of Grace Ives, you need to go back to 2019, when she was in college and laying down the demos for her first record, 2nd, in her bed with a 505 sequencer, Kaossilator, and micro Korg. She split time between her dorm room and her parents’ house, recording songs on GarageBand because she didn’t have Logic. When she put the tape up on Bandcamp, Tom Moore from Dots Per Inch reached out. “Delete that, I’ll put it out for you,” he said. And the rest was history. Ives made Janky Star similarly but co-produced it over Zoom with Justin Raisen during COVID. His experience working with Charli XCX, Kim Gordon, and Yves Tumor allowed him to craft a rich, widescreen backdrop around Ives’ Roland sounds. In post, he sent her versions of her demos that felt so much bigger to her, because she’d come from such a “flat, seven-track mind.”

But hearing “Lullaby” and “On the Ground” and “Isn’t It Lovely” get a boost from Raisen felt like a door opening, she says: “That felt like I was a kid and now I’m not a kid anymore. But making Girlfriend and looking back on Janky Star, I’m like, oh, my God, I was a baby.” Raisen warped Ives’ perspective on what’s possible in computer music. She used to think of it as finding your sound and “putting it in” with minimal effects, but Raisen can make chaos sound perfect, because he’s not afraid of dissonance or distortion, Ives says. “He will fuck something up and then find the beauty of a 0.5-second snippet of it and, somehow, stretch it and it becomes the background or the foreground of a song.”

On Girlfriend, Ives finds great duet partners in Ariel Rechtshaid and John DeBold, two producers with the resumés and sensibilities needed to fill her bedroom pop with a vampy sum of strings and speaker-blowouts, not hollow it out. Rechtshaid has always been loosely in Ives’ orbit, because he and True Panther founder Dean Bein go way back. Having him lend a touch to Girlfriend became a “natural idea” because he and DeBold, whom Ives made these new songs with, are close friends. Ives calls DeBold Rechtshaid’s “interpreter,” because Rechtshaid’s producer language can be very “specific but dreamy.” In need of a second opinion on her new material, DeBold called in a favor, and Rechtshaid slipped into their conversation seamlessly, though Ives admits she was intimidated by him at first. “I was one of those Vampire Weekend kids,” she laughs. “But he’s the funniest person I’ve ever met.”

I quote a famous T-shirt often: “Play Grace Ives,” because she’s my favorite working pop musician. Her working with greats like Rechtshaid, DeBold, and Raisen, two of whom co-produced Night Time, My Time… Let’s just say the music on Girlfriend is as good as I’d hoped it would be. No pop song since “Everything Is Embarrassing” has hit quite like “Trouble,” and “Dance With Me” is a confident, sincere, and bursting potpourri of synths, piano, pump organ, mellotron, cello, and guitar. Rechtshaid and DeBold’s understanding of songcraft and structure on a molecular level blew Ives away. Rechtshaid’s ear is her favorite, and their taste aligns just as she hoped it would. “When you’re a fan of someone and then you meet them in person, you’re like, oh, yeah, they kind of are, but they also have their own special, really amazing thing that is crazy to witness.” She looks up to Rechtshaid, because she’s 5’2” and he’s 6’4”, but when they were sitting on the same couch, looking each other in the eye, and talking shop, Ives was able to put her fan-girling side and speak his musical language fluently.

Ives’ alto is a cyclone on Girlfriend. “My Mans” is fucking ridiculous, and I mean that as a compliment. She’s truly belting that shit. The chorus was huge from the jump, and Rechtshaid said it was huge because she wrote it like “Halo” by Beyoncé. “That’s the song you wrote, dude,” he told her. “That’s your song. You have to be true to it.” The walloping, seat-filling vocal came natural to Ives because she felt so comfortable around DeBold and Rechtshaid. “The more honest I was with them, the better the music would be.” But it was hard, she reveals, to strike a balance between that cool and hushed “tell me where I lost my way completely” part and the over-enunciated, theatrical “my man!” tension. Rechtshaid directed her someplace emotionally new. “I let myself be embarrassed and let myself be cringe,” Ives says.

When she was working on “Stupid Bitches,” it was her job to come in every day with new lyrics because she wasn’t figuring it out. It was kind of a problem, Ives admits, but everyone was really nice to her about it. “But it was so humiliating for me, because I’m in this poetry workshop with two guys who I think are really cool.” Even when she thought she had the song cracked, she says it sounded like “bad Sabrina Carpenter.” After laying down the take, Rechtshaid paged into Ives’ headphones from the control room. “Come in here for a sec,” he said, in a very “getting called into the principal’s office” kind of way. But Rechtshaid broke it down line by line. “I feel like that’s not true, what you’re saying,” he told her. “Why does it have to be true?” she responded. “Why does it have to be even good? All these guys get away with mediocre lyrics and people don’t give a shit.” Rechtshaid paused for a moment. “Yeah, I hear you, but it should be good because you’re really good at it. So just make it good by being honest with yourself.”

And “Stupid Bitches” ended up a delicious tapestry—a hardscrabble electronic patchwork with shifting, buggy falsettos, crushing self-awareness, and an engine of wit. Humor has always played a role in Ives’ work, whether it’s her shouting out Post Malone’s “White Iverson” in “Burn Bridges” or saying that “stupid bitches can’t hurt me.” Growing up, she wasn’t the hot girl in school, so she made it her mission to “be funny and smell good.” She hardly looks for a punchline anymore. She’s funny because that’s how she talks and that’s how she tells stories, so, on Girlfriend, she pushed herself to just tell a story and not bend over backwards for a poetic voice that doesn’t really exist. “You can hear it in certain people’s music, where something doesn’t match up with my idea of who they are,” she says. “I hear it in myself when I say something that feels phony.”

There’s a lyric on Girlfriend that I love: “I think we could be like the air.” It’s just so good, especially in a period where pop-music lyricism has gotten so apathetic and boring. But Ives’ vocabulary has got some bite to it, because she is “crunchy-minded” in her lyrics. She loves Ocean Vuong’s “tear-jerk overload” and the physicality of Sylvia Plath’s writing about depression. Fiona Apple’s “Heavy Balloon” holds space next to Annie Baker’s screenwriting and Chris Kraus’ criticism. Her playlists are filled with the Magnetic Fields and Feist. She even cites Mitski singing “today I will wear my white button down” in “A Burning Hill” as an influence and gives herself chills doing so. Ives keeps a master doc of everything she’s ever highlighted in a book that she’s read, in case she needs inspiration. We should all be pissed that we didn’t come up with phrases like “wound myself up to curl into you” or “sun on my chest, I’m a scale for its hidden weight” first.

THE INDIE SLEAZE ERA was an aesthetic and musical motivator for Ives while she made Janky Star, like Santogold and Spank Rock. “Were you still communicating with that era while making Girlfriend?” I ask her. “I’ve gone elsewhere,” she laughs. “It’s hard because all of these kids are growing up now and they’re like, ‘Wait, that’s so cool.’ And we’re like, ‘Yeah, we know. Let’s keep going.” It was easy for Ives to recreate that style when she was 22 or 26 years old, making a beat with one fat synth over it, but she’s 30 now and the “sleaze” of it all is just messiness, which is a natural part of her palette anyway. But so is Fleetwood Mac and the Grateful Dead and New Order, because that’s what her dad was into (and you can hear those artists’ presence subtly in “What If?”). For Girlfriend, she and DeBold were listening to everything but only in snippets. Well, except for one song: Post Malone’s “Sunflower,” although it’s going to take a music critic smarter than I to pinpoint where exactly that influence lands on Girlfriend. Ives says she looked to technical inspirations more than cultural phases. The references were less confined.

Ives is a collector who surrounds herself with trinkets and decorations. She once called 2nd a collage, and I always thought that spoke well to the scatteredness of her obsessions. In Janky Star and especially in Girlfriend there is a tactile feeling to the music, as if her songs are ephemera on a shelf. She’s a maximalist who loves to physically arrange objects and have a background, middle ground, and foreground. She hears like that, too, and it helps her “build an atmosphere,” so to speak. Sounds fly in and out on Girlfriend. The album is her tableau, a still life, a portal. It’s not moving and it’s not a mess of pick-up stix. “It’s my little diorama put together.” Sensible clutter, I’d call it.

In a 2nd-era interview, Ives said long songs gave her “sensory overload,” but her music is getting longer in the 2020s. After mastering the two-minute runtime, she’s got a couple bangers on Girlfriend that scrape toward the four-minute mark. Ives brings the conversation back to honesty, admitting that she’s a dramatic person who’s finally embracing the drama of an outro. “Finding these unique sounds and affecting them, bending them, breaking them, and stretching them… that just makes me be like, oh, my God, let’s keep doing that for a second.” She’s playing around a lot more on Girlfriend, too; some of those piano and synth parts aren’t happening on a laptop, they’re instrumental passages that have unhinged her from the verse-chorus-verse-chorus fashion she exemplified on 2nd and Janky Star.

Four years ago, Ives described Janky Star as an “imperfect shape,” and I loved that. The record went full-tilt, with love letters to 109 organs, Tommy Tutone-style numerologies, and disentangled fatalism packed into sobering yet miniature pop spirituals. With our time running out, I take a cliché beat and ask Ives to sum up Girlfriend. We sit in silence for five minutes while she mulls the prompt over, wanting to get her answer just right. First, she pictures car wheels spinning. The phrase “a trip” bounces between us before she brushes it aside. “Driving away from an older version of yourself?” she questions aloud before landing someplace else. “It feels like I’m getting a new glasses prescription,” she says, still only half-sure but chuffed by the metaphor. “Like, I cannot believe I used to not see everything like this.” But then she grins herself into a eureka moment. “It’s like when a baby wears glasses and sees their mom. It’s like, oh, my God.”

Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.

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