At some point when you learn how to drive, if you’re lucky enough, you’ll cross a threshold where your confidence allows the world to expand beyond the limits of your self-consciousness. Your eyes will lock on the horizon and for a moment the vastness will stun you like it never would if you weren’t behind the wheel. The schmaltzy, the obvious becomes beautiful, like the message that appears before Grace Ives on the outro to the penultimate song of her incandescent new album, Girlfriend: “I’m no stranger to that sage advice/ If you love her, let her find her life.” Headed for the freeway, she’s “off with my little mind,” and if you’ve loved Ives’ past work, you know “little” is the kindest compliment. Charting her journey to sobriety, she and co-producers Ariel Rechtshaid and John DeBold dig through the wreckage to uncover an artist more big-hearted, bold, and buzzed with life than the introvert who’d shrink at the scale of it. You can catch Ives on the road on many of these songs (and playing them); you can also hear her marveling.
1. Now I’m
The opening track finds Ives in an aqueous, rejuvenated state of mind: before her voice announces that she’s out in California, the relaxed drums and finely textured synths already point to its riches. Though the production retains its crystalline simplicity, it’s clear her vision stretches out beyond this brief glimpse of the good life, where the “lovely messes” of Janky Star could take the shape of pure, all-consuming love – the gap between feeling you’re “in the water” and “on the ocean.” You can return to the same place and discover it’s flooded with a whole new range of possibilities.
2. Avalanche
In reckoning with her chaotic behaviour, Ives identifies her reckless tendencies and the ensuing numbness as two sides of the same coin. She’s blunt – “Feeling sorry not sorry for the mess that I make” – but stops herself from romanticizing it in hindsight. And while early singles like ‘Avalanche’ showcased the DIY artist’s penchant for big-tent pop, notice the unusual way she lets the weight accumulate in the post-chorus instead of the moment the main hook kicks in: the encroaching synths, the aching “mmms.” Another producer might have punched up the beat a little more on the second verse, but it heaves like panic here as Ives and her collaborators lock into a cerebral haze.
3. Fire 2
As portraits of burnout go, ‘Fire 2’ could hardly be more literal: “I’m blue as a match, I’m unkempt, unattached,” Ives sings, “I’m the shadow of a girl who’s just doing her best.” Even as her voice turns cavernous and weary, her words are still as vivid as the production, which at one point feeds them back to her in a blurry, nightmarish loop. The song is almost ridiculously kinetic and lush, the closest the album comes to resembling Rechtshaid’s work with HAIM, but even at its sparkliest, the music stays unruly. A match fit for dancing.
4. Drink Up
The sharpest, most subversive thing about ‘Drink Up’ is that it’s the first song on the album without a chorus. How do you make that euphoric leap, musically, when you’re armed with the awareness of how catastrophic a “little hit” can turn out to be? So when you expect it to lurch skyward, it instead slushes from one verse to the next, tellingly subtitled (Bridge? Slow Part?) and (Post-slow?) in the lyric sheet I’m looking at. The song’s quizzical nature doesn’t make it feel any less complete; if anything, the slip-up forces experimentation before anyone in the studio gets too comfortable. Mid-binge, she’s thinking up a “cheeky little epitaph,” but ‘Drink Up’ was always going to be around the middle of the tracklist.
5. My Mans
Any pop star could belt out the lines “The more that I want/ Well, the less that I know,” but only a poet totally unburdened by vulnerability could let them a blossom into a chorus like this: “And they all just melt away my meaning/ I’ll be your candle but I’ll weep my wax/ If they all flattened out beneath me/ I’d see forever down a clear cut path.” Objects of desire sometimes stand as roadblocks on the path to incandescent longing, which in the world of Girlfriend is synonymous with commitment. What does weeping one’s wax sound like, you might wonder? Atop piano chords that simply do not let up, an ocean’s worth of sighs, burbling synths, and humming as if to say: The choice is yours, but now you know what I really want.
6. Dance With Me
Leave it to Grace Ives to open the first openly joyful song on Girlfriend by quoting The Hours: “Always the love and the years between us.” If the opener skirts the difference between being “in the water” and “on the ocean,” ‘Dance With Me’ embodies the feeling in the decision to stop watching the film alone in bed and go out into the world, even if only to find a copy of the book in your local library. For a song about feeling the weight of the world nudging you to experience it, it’s resoundingly light, a vibrant array of piano, mellotron, and strings bringing Ives closer to her aspiration of being “like the air.” When she sings about her feet leaving the ground, a vocal effect briefly makes her sound like a child again. Of course “the world is bigger than we thought it be,” she acknowledges, remedying herself by finding beauty in the expanse.
7. Neither You Nor I
When did we go from “cheeky little epitaph” to “chubby little blade”? ‘Neither You Nor I’, delirious and prickly, has an air of “if you know, you know” about the intersection of pleasure and pain. It prompts one of the most primal rhythm sections on Girlfriend, which is a treat.
8. Trouble
Rather than poetic or introspective, ‘Trouble’ is conversational, addressing the toll her drinking has had on a long-term relationship with the exhaustiveness of a heart-to-heart that’s bound to go all night. Ives is quick to admit fault and even hungry for the worst accusations, the catchy melody belying the knot in her throat like a smile. The straightforward pop structure, coloured with a few welcome flourishes, only makes the confession more uncomfortable. But it also prescribes a runtime, which means you can move on.
9. What If
By the time we get to ‘What If’, the frustration and self-loathing at the song’s core is familiar. But in contrast to the “up to you” of ‘My Mans’, ‘What If’ is all about taking accountability as your shitty behaviour keeps playing in your head like a movie, the kind that can make your stomach churn only to elicit a remark like, “That was quite the scene.” It comes off as both understated and wholehearted, trading the mechanic pulse of ‘Trouble’ for a real thrum. And when the “worn ass tires” turn out to be Chekhov’s gun? Man, that’s quite the hand that she played.
10. Garden
Isn’t it funny, ‘Garden’ suggests, how lifting your feet off the ground can feel as liberatingly childish as having them firmly planted there? How groundedness can feel so heavenly? “Lucky to be lonely and hold myself tight and I/ Light all my supply in a fire,” she sings, later adding, “Lucky to lay down and call it a life.” Rather than a rectifying record of a meltdown, Girlfriend is awash with wonder at the warmth it’s produced, the scent filling the air, the sheer clarity of it all. Musically, ‘Garden’ is the slow part, sans question mark. It’s well-deserved.
11. Stupid Bitches
I recently waxed poetic about ‘Stupid Bitches’, which might as well go down as the best pop song of 2026. ‘Avalanche’, ‘Dance With Me’, ‘My Mans’ – all great 2025 singles you could, blissfully ignorant of the then-unannounced full-length, group together as a fantastic EP. But of course Ives had to leave the best for last, both in a promotional and album-sequencing sense: What better way to affirm that it’s never over when you think it is than by ending with a song that seems to kickstart the engine all over again? ‘Stupid Bitches’ is a treasure trove of piercing metaphors and spine-tingling electronics, none of which overshadow Ives’ tenacious performance. In the lead-up to Girlfriend, you wanted to take her impenetrability at face value. At this point, you can’t help but believe her.
