Grace Ives on Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Girlfriend’ and why being real still matters

Grace Ives is staring down the sort of career move that can recalibrate how an artist is seen. A few days after the news broke, she appears on NME’s screen from a San Francisco hotel room, pastel pink hair loosely haloing her face, and says she feels “pretty ecstatic”. Next year, she’ll open for Olivia Rodrigo on sold-out arena dates in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Munich and London, her first proper test in rooms that size. For someone who started by uploading music from a dorm, first as ringtones and then as an EP of nursery rhymes, it is a long way from the small-scale ecosystem where her name first took root.

“It feels like the biggest present I’ve ever gotten in my life,” she says. “I don’t know what the appropriate reaction is. I’m overwhelmed by the vision of what that looks like when I close my eyes. It feels so massive and exciting, like what I’m doing right now, but times 200. It’s the final stage artists work towards, and I get to try it out for a week or two. It’s the ultimate validation, like the biggest person in the world being like ‘I fuck with you.’”

That kind of momentum didn’t arrive out of nowhere. Ives’ third album, Girlfriend, came out in March and was met with the strongest critical response of her career, building on the groundwork laid by Janky Star in 2022 and her debut 2nd in 2019. The current headline run may be taking her through smaller venues than the Rodrigo support slots, but it still says plenty about her draw: her London date next month is already sold out. Onstage, she’s drawing from all three albums, a set that reflects just how much her catalogue has evolved from the homemade, slightly off-center beginnings.

She also hears something telling in the way Rodrigo’s upcoming tour has been framed. Ives notes the company in the lineup, pointing to openers like Wolf Alice and Die Spitz, and reads it as a sign of where Rodrigo’s taste may be heading. “I’m excited to hear the rest of Olivia’s new music because it feels like this [opener] lineup is pointing to something a lot dirtier and grungier than I would associate with her and her work in the past,” she says. Rodrigo has already edged toward rock, but Ives is struck by the range around her. “It’s cool that this is the music she’s excited by. It’s not super clean, and the landscape is sonically pretty diverse.”

That appetite for messier textures fits Ives’ own path. Girlfriend grew out of a stretch of life she describes, with characteristic bluntness, as “gross.” In a manifesto accompanying the record, she cast herself as a bad daughter, a shitty girlfriend and a disaster who had abandoned both herself and her music. The breakdown she describes arrived after the success of Janky Star, an album that introduced many listeners to her world by folding the synth and electro-pop of her homemade debut into pianos, guitars and those high, almost spectral vocals, especially on the standout “Lullaby,” where she sang of “what a mess, what a lovely mess.”

For Girlfriend, though, Ives wasn’t lingering inside the wreckage so much as trying to clean it up. That shift came after what she calls “a desperate search for a sense of self.” “I would find myself catapulted into things that have nothing to do with me,” she says. “But I needed to test things in order to see who I am. It’s the whole writer joke of doing it for the memoir. I feel like that might just be a thing that women go through.”

The experiment eventually stopped being funny. Giving up drinking and trying to be more honest with herself and other people felt, to her, like a release rather than a sacrifice. “I didn’t realise how uncomfortable [I was]. I think it’s so much nicer to tell the truth, for me personally,” she says. “I’m an anxious person, and adding a fakeness on top of anxiety is just a recipe for bad art. I’ve definitely done that. I’ve made music from a place of not wanting to be true to myself, and it hasn’t turned out the way that I personally wanted it, you know? The best version of it.”

To get there, Ives worked with Ariel Rechtshaid, whose credits include Charli xcx and Vampire Weekend, and John DeBold, who has worked with HAIM and Dijon. The result is a record that moves with more room and clarity than some of her earlier material without losing the unease underneath. “John and I definitely did a lot of playing, we’re like two kids in the sandbox,” she says. “There was a lot of joy and a lot of acceptance between the two of us. And Ariel, he has a relationship with John where they’re like brothers, and I fit into that dynamic really well.”

Still, she doesn’t pretend the process was easy. At times, she says, it felt like “vulnerability bootcamp.”

“All of a sudden it’s like, ‘Hey Grace, what were those lyrics that you were saying earlier that no one really liked, including you? Can you read them to everybody?’” she says, dropping into a deeper register and acting the scene out. “I’m reading my bad poetry. That’s where the vulnerability came in. That’s the test of breaking through that wall. If you go through with it, then suddenly you are free to say anything.”

That openness runs through the album’s more restless corners. On “Drink Up,” she calls herself a “little bitch” while taking “little hits of this and sips of that,” her voice shifting from confident to petulant as the song moves through bouncy, distorted and finally lush passages. “‘Drink Up’ exists in three parts and includes tempo changes, starts and stalls. When you try to record that, it can feel heady or like pretentious music theory. I feel like we got it to feel natural, and this song in particular, with all the mood changes to feel natural, it’s ambitious.”

The record keeps making those kinds of moves. “Stupid Bitches” sends her distorted vocals spinning around the line “it doesn’t hurt me anymore” over clashing percussion and strings. On the glitchy “Avalanche,” she says she’s “feeling sorry not sorry for the mess I made,” before a siren-like call cuts through. “My Mans” gives her voice a different kind of shape, steady at first, almost like a chant, before she leans into full pop force in the chorus. It all lands as feminine and feral, alluring and scathing at once, especially when she sings, “Every single guy I meet completes me/ I need a lover who can love me back.” You may not trust the narrator, but the pull is hard to ignore.

Grace Ives credit: Maddy Rottman

After building an album out of the debris of a short-lived self-sabotage spiral, Ives is almost cheerfully in favour of the crash-out as a concept. “I think crash-outs show people who you are. Or, even if it doesn’t, and it feels like a weird toddler version of you, tantruming that you wouldn’t wanna claim as your own… It’s easy to be like, ‘Oh my god, I was so crazy!’ But that was you. It’s good to lose your composure every now and then because you got it out of the way. People are complicated. And people should be allowed to be complicated.”

That complexity has to survive success as much as failure. Rodrigo’s spotlight has already prompted some publications to slot Ives into the category of indie artists about to “blow up,” including in indie acts who are about to “blow up”. For an artist who has worked to strip away false fronts, the label is a useful reminder that momentum can flatten people if they let it. “I have to be very careful to be true to myself and nice to myself and let myself be who I am,” she says. “Because I think that the realest version of myself is what people respond to.”

Grace Ives’ Girlfriend is out now via True Panther Records/Capitol Records. She is on tour now and will support Olivia Rodrigo in 2027.