Labels make Grace Ives uneasy. “I’m a writer,” she says, and then immediately dismantles the certainty of it. “You don’t write one day and suddenly it’s like, fuck. I guess I’m not a writer.” She laughs, recognising the absurdity of it all. The same logic applies everywhere: girlfriend, musician, daughter, artist – roles that are expected to be tied up neatly, like a bow in your hair.
Talking to Ives means the conversation can pivot quickly from the mundane to the philosophical. Mid-interview she apologises for boiling eggs – “you have to forgive me, I picked a really strange time to do this” – and moments later she’s describing the way we reduce people to roles. We build them up in our heads, she says. “Mom comes to mean care and responsibility, even though she’s also just a human being.” After a moment she shrugs at the whole idea. “It’s everybody’s first time doing everything.”
That tension between the neatness of roles and the mess of actually inhabiting them is all over her latest album, Girlfriend. The record follows three singles released late last year: ‘Avalanche’, ‘My Mans’ and ‘Dance With Me’. “Usually in the past I’m a little more insecure,” she says. “I don’t go around like, you should really check it out, it’s dope.” This time she’s blunt: “You have to listen to it. I think it’s so good.”
For Ives, the album has been an evolution, lyrically pushing her harder than before. “I want to be able to say what I’m feeling and reflect on these things that have happened to me.”
So, reading became part of the work. She describes going to libraries in Los Angeles, sitting with books, highlighting lines, transcribing passages and using them as prompts. “I’m a big highlighter when I read,” she says. “I underline things that make you stop.” Later, she would copy those fragments into a sprawling document of references, “like little nuggets,” as she puts it, using them to unlock new ways of expressing a feeling.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath was a major touchstone. “I had never read it before,” she says, still sounding slightly awed by the discovery. “I literally just got chills.” What moves her is not simply the darkness, but the beauty and brutality of Plath’s self-description and how the novel manifests emotional states as tactile, visual, and inescapably real. “The way she talks about herself is so mean and beautiful and relatable,” Ives says. “She just has a way of painting these really simple, beautiful pictures.”
Musically, Ives wants the opposite of rust, she wants motion. “I want to feel it in my body,” she says. “I want to make a groove.” Her songs feel bright enough to move to and heavy enough to hurt. She often finds herself asking a single question: “How did I lose myself?” She laughs, catching how bleak it sounds. “I have one song that’s happy on the record,” she says. “The rest are very blue.”
Even her listening habits refuse to stay in one lane. Asked what’s been stuck in her head this week, she answers like someone emptying their pockets. “Oh my God, so many.” There’s ‘Internet Girl’ by KATSEYE, which has become, as she puts it, “a vocal tick.” A cover of ‘Heart of Gold’ by the Navajo band The Sundowners, and a Fête D’Adieu track she describes with a grin: “It’s so cute, minimal but upbeat.”
For years, the one thing that did stay in a lane was her process. She was creating almost entirely alone, contained and defensible. “As a girl making music,” she says, “you feel like you have to prove you did everything yourself.” Not just because you can, but because you don’t want anyone to look at the credits and decide you didn’t. “There’s this anxiety that people will be like, ‘Oh. She didn’t really write this, there was like a guy there to do it and she performed it.’”
Girlfriend rewired that fear. The process began in Los Angeles, where Ives went on what she jokingly calls a “producer tour,” meeting different collaborators in search of the right fit. She found it with producer John DeBold.
With DeBold, the dynamic felt natural. “There was a sense of alignment with our young kind of naïve ambition,” she says. Her ideal studio environment is almost childlike in its openness: “Wouldn’t it be cool to just be two kids in the studio… being like, ‘I don’t know about this, but let’s try’?”
They spent a year building the album’s foundation, long enough to make the songs great and then overwork them until they stopped being good at all. Eventually they had to admit it: “We fucked up.”
That’s when Ariel Rechtshaid entered the process. Ives describes him as something between an editor and a reality check, “the captain,” as she puts it. Mid-thought she searches for another phrase. “Deus ex machina… is that what that means?” she asks, laughing at herself, as if he arrived to descend into the studio and sort out the chaos.
“Grace, that’s not a song,” she recalls him saying. Sometimes what she thought was her favourite idea turned out to be something smaller. “This song that you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s my favourite one’, it’s just a sample that you love.”
“It’s hard too, because you get challenged,” she says. At times it meant reading lyrics aloud, something she compares to speaking “in front of the class”, pushing through ideas she might normally abandon halfway. “I’ve gotten better at editing, trimming the fat.”
At one point she remembers panicking over ‘My Man’ because of how nakedly big it sounded. “It’s so dramatic and epic, it sounds like fucking ‘Halo’ by Beyoncé,” she says, laughing at how embarrassing it felt to mean something that much. Rechtshaid’s response, she remembers, was matter-of-fact.“I don’t know what you thought the song was gonna be. Because that’s the song you wrote. So just let it be that.”
For Ives, that moment became a turning point. Instead of sanding the songs down into something cooler or more controlled, she started letting them stay a little exposed. “I’m trying to honour myself a little bit more,” she says. “To be vulnerable and be embarrassed.”