These days, vulnerability in pop music often means detailing the specifics of your private life for public spectacle. Artists falsely equate compelling songwriting with half-baked confessions and surface-level metaphors as ravenous fans get to work decoding frankly obvious signifiers and/or numerological references. Narcissistic self-mythologizing becomes the priority above all else. As a result, a good chunk of contemporary pop music feels like homework. Indie-pop auteur Grace Ives, however, understands and presents that vulnerability differently.
The New Yorker-turned-Angeleno confronts the aftermath of her past errors, half-wincing and half-winking, mortified by her behavior but charming enough to come away unscathed. Girlfriend, Ives’ third album, doesn’t delve into the unnecessary details but gives you just enough to convince you to enjoy the thrills of the ride. Rather than explicating all of her regrettable decisions in a boring straight line, she takes thrilling detours to form a jagged, pinballing trajectory that’s the sonic equivalent of a hallucinogenic reverie. With the assistance of co-producers Ariel Rechtshaid and John DeBold, she opens up her Roland-driven bedroom-pop and once-hushed vocal delivery to expansive, exciting effect. Ives trusts her audience in the sense that she doesn’t simply tell us she’s being vulnerable. She shows us through her execution of the music itself.
That metamorphosis is readily apparent from the album’s introductory one-two punch. “Now I’m” is a feint of sorts; a wispy, two-minute levee. Those whispers soon relent to the cascading candy rush of arpeggiated synths and thumping drums on “Avalanche,” a song so insistently infectious that it’s easy to hear its origins as a ringtone. “I go go go, and I take take take / Feeling sorry not sorry for the plans that I make,” she sings in the second verse, airing out her quasi-apologies before the chorus returns to burst open the floodgates once more.
The cheeky “Drink Up” is a liquor-induced travelogue through a night of overindulgence. “Drink up, just a little bit / Sharp words from a dull, drawn mouth,” Ives mutters under her breath, riding the offbeat, closed-mic’d and unfettered. As the song progresses, the instruments adapt and follow Ives’ lead. When the bridge hits, it shifts from its half-time groove to lean into the melodrama Ives suddenly finds herself in: “When the rain is washing in / Could you save a drop for me? / Baby wants to cut me off / But no one could measure me.” The emotion becomes even more palpable in the final chorus, when the feelings bubble up as she asks her subject if it was ever real love in the first place.
Ives goes full-on Lana drama for the big ballad “My Mans,” a song she was initially reluctant to embrace until Rechtshaid compared it to Beyoncé’s “Halo” and encouraged her to own any potential schmaltz. “I let myself be embarrassed and let myself be cringe,” she told Paste last month. It’s the most impressive vocal performance across the record, a shamelessly heart-on-sleeve moment that displays what Ives is truly capable of. You can imagine it as a needle-drop during a teenage rom-com’s pivotal breakup scene, rain and tears and the whole damn works. “Tell me where I lost my way completely / I’d be his shadow just to have his back,” she belts at the top of the chorus. “Fire 2” highlights Ives’ writerly wit by likening her collateral damage to starting a fire in a blackout, keeping everyone awake while locking her door to prevent them from ensuring her safety. Dexterous breakbeats and cinematic strings coexist in her universe, a vaudevillian funfest where the impulsive and the deliberate can convene in perfect harmony.
The antepenultimate “What If” is an admission of guilt with revelations that play out in real time. “It was up to me and I drank / It was up to me and I tanked,” go her syncopated repetitions toward the song’s end. It all comes to a striking head when Ives can no longer continue singing, breaking from the pattern for two wordless vocalizations that contain as much remorse for her subject as they do for herself. All that contrition is turned on its head for the closing banger “Stupid Bitches,” a song that’s aimed at her haters but, perhaps subtextually, aimed just as much at the hate-ee, like a point-blank shot whose violent blowback also ends up harming the weapon’s wielder. “I just let it be embarrassing / So you left me with a broken wing,” Ives sings before issuing a declaration of dulled pain: “Doesn’t hurt me anymore.”
Girlfriend is a clear step up from Ives’ already sterling 2022 breakthrough, Janky Star. She’s a shrewd songwriter and producer, one who understands that the appeal of great pop music (and storytelling in general) is that it veers away from instructive formalism. No one wants to be told how to feel. Trust your listeners to get on your level without needing to explain it all. Here, Grace Ives faces the music, and, crucially, she lets us feel it, too. [True Panther/Capitol]
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
