In the fall of 2023, Grace Ives returned home to New York. After spending most of the previous year touring her critically acclaimed second album, Janky Star, within a matter of weeks she found herself—for lack of a better term—crashing out. In a remarkably candid letter accompanying the musician’s latest three singles—released under the tongue-in-cheek title of, well, Singles—Ives recounts the period that followed: hitting rock bottom; crying and vomiting; “drinking, lying, and hiding.” While Ives had been candid in the past about her difficult relationship with alcohol and drugs, things had reached a new low.
“It’s so crazy,” she tells me, clearly on the other side of that turbulent period. She’s sitting, fresh-faced and with cotton candy-pink hair, in the home office of her Brooklyn apartment, surrounded by bric-à-brac. “Even just trying to close my eyes and think about what happened… it feels like I wasn’t myself. It doesn’t feel like a true part of me, or who I am right now.” She likens the experience of being holed up at home to water sitting still for too long: “things just got stagnant and murky and disgusting.”
“I stopped working and performing and didn’t have to be in the studio, and I wasn’t taking care of myself,” Ives goes on. So how does she feel today? “I feel like I’m just now realizing what my life is—or just now feeling like I’m living a real life,” she replies, before breaking into a smile. “It’s a little like opening all the windows in the house and letting the fresh air come in.”
You can hear it in the music. In lieu of the hyperactive, tightly wound tracks on Janky Star—like pop songs bitten off in chunks and chewed up into strangely elegant new forms—the first track of the three released last week, “Avalanche,” lands with an epic sweep. “I want, want, want and I take, take, take / Feeling sorry not sorry for the mess that I make,” she sings over a frenzied, ping-ponging beat before launching into a thrilling chorus packed with thundering piano chords, Enya-like synth stabs, and Ives giving it all she’s got vocally.
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