Grace Ives: Girlfriend review – Bedroom pop auteur turns to widescreen for a brilliant sobriety saga | music

nNew Yorker Grace Ives broke out as a bedroom pop artist, self-producing No. 2, her 2019 debut, on her Roland MC-505 and carefully expanding her sound for 2022’s catchy Janky Star. Her third album throws caution to the wind on hyper-detailed, windswept songs that pop like big-city street lights and shimmer with cosmic awe.

Eve fled her bedroom in more than one sense. Junky Starr reflected her development into a healthy relationship with substances, yet she reached new lows after its release, making sobriety non-negotiable. She went to write in California, where she found safety in a new context rather than trying to change on her own at home. Her determination and vulnerability fuel Girlfriend, which shares the conspiratorial sweetness and broken-mirror sparkle of celebrated pop classics by Lorde (Melodrama) and Sky Ferreira (Night Time, My Time).

Ives’s songs are packed with detail — Avalanche is filled with crafted synths, raucous piano, sharp strings, and shards of EDM — but they never stifle her raw vocals, which drive the melodies to earworms. There are nods to British club classics: Fire borrows the existential rush of Olive’s “You’re Not Alone”; The standout Stupid Bitches, an exhilarating exorcism, brings to mind Basement Jaxx’s Where’s Your Head.

Ives is upfront about what she’s firing. The lurching Drink Up exposes the self-compromising mentality of addiction, its fragmented lines suggesting a habitual creep. “I’m not your sea of ​​love,” Trouble sings, referencing the famous cover by Cat Power, who has been open about her own dependency issues. But Ives is also kind to herself: in “The Garden,” she adores the possibility of being freed “from the hell of my pride,” a feeling that emerges through this wonderful, beautiful rebirth.