Grace Ives, Girlfriend review – New York indie-rocker sounds braver than ever
Get the inside track from Roisin O’Connor with our free weekly music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This “Baby, It was quite the scene when I drank… I tanked,” sings Grace Ives on her third album, Girlfriend. It’s a record that sees New York’s indie darling unpack the mess of her drinking years over her trademark jingly-jangly synth-pop sounds. Whispered confessions of shame, reckless yelps of denial and the yearning for a fresh start jostle with giddy crescendos of elegant strings, burbling keyboards, wonky samples and prettily plucked acoustic guitars. Imagine an AA meeting in which a motley crew of participants express themselves with a Roland MC-505 and you’re about there. Endearingly – and in keeping with Ives’s need for direct communication – she wrote her own press release to accompany the record. In it, she tells us that Girlfriend is this story of a “crash out” that ended in “hospital bills galore”. ”I fell down stairs,” she writes. “I called …
