- True Panther/Capitol
- 2026
Not long after she released Janky Star, Grace Ives burned out fast. The New York-bred artist’s 2022 breakthrough album was an exemplar of small-scale pop with big feelings, positing her as the next pop diva by way of Bushwick. After getting home from touring that record, however, the rush became too much to bear. “I hit a true rock bottom and have been finding my way out of the dark hole I dug for myself since then,” Ives wrote in an open letter in November 2025. Amid all that despair, Ives all but formally retired from music, neglected whatever relationships remained, and drank — so much so that her life, she says, had become brutally stagnant. Time she’d set aside for songwriting, for instance, turned into accidental benders.
And so before she really got to work on her third album Girlfriend, out this Friday, Ives needed a fresh start like a star needs hydrogen. She dyed her hair pink, moved to Los Angeles, and, crucially, got sober. Her loved ones began to trust her again. She started to trust herself again. “I can see a future/ I can see a beautiful plan,” she sings on Girlfriend’s schmaltzy opener “Now I’m,” which finds her with a renewed sense of purpose transplanted in her unfamiliar, but promising California home. “Calling up my baby/ Says he wants to go where I go.” Where the bedroom synths of Janky Star carried a sense of pent-up anxiety in their quiet chaos, Girlfriend — Ives' biggest-sounding album to date — finds comfort in the expansiveness of the world, her fuck-ups and dark holes merely fleeting blips on the universe’s radar.
As Ives tells it, her dependence on liquid courage made being honest without it a challenge (“White lie, I’m a little snitch,” she admits between swigs on the downtempo chug of "Drink Up"), and those restraints bled into her songwriting. She began writing the seeds of Girlfriend before her sobriety journey officially began, later fleshing those ideas out into demos with fresh, unobstructed ears — both her own and those of co-producers John DeBold and Ariel Rechtshaid, whose embellishments of tack piano, organs, and a Mellotron help bridge the gap between Ives’ DIY roots and the sounds of more polished, major-label alt-pop. But beyond the album’s production, Ives says DeBold and Rechtshaid also lent plenty of feedback on her lyrics, a mildly mortifying experience she’s affectionately referred to as “vulnerability boot camp.” You feel that most transparently in moments like the piercing ballad “My Mans,” where Ives’ typical rasp bursts into her closest approximation of a proper belt as she begins to embrace devotion again: “Tell me where I lost my way completely/ I’d be his shadow just to have his back.”
The Ives you hear on Girlfriend isn’t particularly interested in poeticizing or obfuscating feelings, instead more akin to the straightforward, diaristic approach pop heavyweights like Charli XCX or Robyn might employ on their softer sides. (“If I run right off for my cute little life/ Then I’ll settle into something and I’ll die by the knife,” from the sweltering early single “Avalanche,” feels particularly Charli-like.) The album’s first half seemingly catches us up on Ives’ three-year absence, recalling faint memories of countless blackouts and crash outs and the ensuing self-sabotage. “My voice is tired/ I heard it fall flat when I said, ‘Maybe I’ll try again,’” she sings on the especially illuminating dance number “Fire 2.” “I’m blue as a match, I’m unkempt, unattached/ I’m the shadow of a girl who’s just doing her best/ I lay in my nest and I’m fat and half-pretty.”
As Girlfriend progresses, it zooms outward to encapsulate the world around its narrator, reflecting on what happens when Ives’ maladaptive behaviors no longer impact just herself: “How come it hurts when I read it out/ The message I sent that I’m staying out?” she asks on the mellow mid-album highlight “Dance With Me,” the magnitude of the implications unfurling in real time. “Trouble” takes stock of her long-term relationship throughout the highs and lows of her alcohol dependency: “You found me wrecked upon the shore/ I’m not your sea of love/ I'm just a spill we're cleaning up,” she sings over plunky keys. “Trouble in the rising sun/ I’ve always known you were the one.” The subtle industrial noise of “What If” broods with self-directed frustration: “It was up to me and I drank/ It was up to me and I tanked,” Ives sings over and over again in the outro, pitch-shifted and overdubbed until it mirrors the constant nagging voices in her head.
But Girlfriend, whose title seems to signify Ives’ desire to be a better person to her boyfriend as much as to herself, is ultimately optimistic, written with just enough hindsight to know from personal experience that there’s a viable path out of rock bottom. The album closes with “Stupid Bitches,” a soulful, tongue-in-cheek banger that quickly harbors some resolute confidence: “I'm a bullet on an arrow's path,” she sings, and you get the sense that her target has never been more apparent or attainable. Girlfriend might not get too deep into the nitty-gritty of self-destruction, but it very well could go down as one of the year’s most pertinent examples of pop’s remedial properties: forged opportunities to let those big feelings flow easily, while simultaneously understanding the world is big enough, too, to shoulder at least some of the pain.
Girlfriend is out 3/20 via True Panther/Capitol.
Other albums of note out this week:
• BTS' ARIRANG
• Luke Combs' The Way I Am
• Mike WiLL Made-IT's R3SET
• Underscores' U
• Gladie's No Need To Be Lonely
• Alessia Cara's Love Or Lack Thereof
• Avalon Emerson & The Charm's Written Into Changes
• Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso's Free Spirits
• Poison The Well's Peace In Place
• Damaged Bug's ZUZAX
• Green-House's Hinterlands
• Filth Is Eternal's Impossible World
• Girl Scout's Brink
• Gaerea's Loss
• Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, & Macie Stewart's BODY SOUND
• Haircut 100's Boxing The Compass
• John Hollier & The Rêverie's Rainmaker
• Ladytron's Paradises
• Tenderness' True
• TYKETTO's Closer To The Sun
• Colleen's Libres antes del final
• KillerStar's The Afterglow
• The Dandy Warhols' PIN UPS
• Peach PRC's Porcelain
• Footballhead's Weight Of The Truth
• Otracami's Runoff
• Nubiyan Twist's Chasing Shadows
• Amiture Music's Amiture Music
• Son Little's CITYFOLK
• Ringing's another cycle in the cosmic wash
• Robert Lester Folsom's If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes: Archives Vol. 3, 1972-1975
• Black Beach's Mail Thief
• more eaze's sentence structure in the country
• Edwin Raphael's I Know A Garden
• Water Is The Sun's Ritual Fever
• Exodus' Goliath
• Gyða Valtýsdottir's Mother Pearl
• Public Appeal's hello my name is public appeal
• Tedeschi Trucks Band's Future Soul
• The Silver's Looking Glass Hymnal Blue
• Aerosmith's Aerosmith (Legendary Edition)
• ZHU's BLACK MIDAS
• Suitor's Saw You Out With The Weeds
• Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, & the Mothers' Bongo Fury (50th Anniversary Edition)
• Blair / Huber's In A New Order
• Manchester Orchestra's Union Chapel, London, England Live Album
• Sleep Paralysis' A Visitor's Soundtrack
• Pan-American's Fly The Ocean In A Silver Plane
• Prairie Prince's "Colours And Passions"
• Dropkick Murphys & Haywire’s New England Forever Split
• The Undercover Dream Lovers' Atomic House
• Egregore's It Echoes In The Wild
• Carlos Niño & Friends' Bubble Bath For Giants
• Spencer Thomas' Cynical Vision
• Alex Isley's When The City Sleeps
• Aubrie Sellars' Attachment Theory
• Ellie O'Neill's Time Of Fallow
• Immanuel Wilkins' Immanuel Wilkins Quartet: Live At The Village Vanguard Vol. 1
• Naomi Scott's F.I.G.
• Hurray For The Riff Raff's Live Forever Live Album
• Various Artists' Indian Talking Machine Part Two: Instrumental Gems From The 78rpm Era
• Imaad Wasif's SUPERCONSCIOUSNESS
• Lost In Hollywood's Lost In Hollywood
• American Steel's American Steel
• Alarm Will Sound's Lift
• Vero's Razor Tongue
• Morgan Evans' Steel Town
• St. Vincent's Live In London
• Central Cee's All Roads Lead Home EP
• Girl Group's Little Sticky Pictures EP
• Yeek's Zodiac EP
• Flatwounds' Chain Of Command EP
• Adam Klobi's YESTERDAY, TODAY EP
• Operelly's FLUTTERS AWAY EP
• The Clearwater Swimmers' Radio Flyer EP
• Mizery's Mizery EP
• Anna Calvi's Is This All There Is? EP
• Gutvoid's Liminal Shrines EP
