Grace Ives and the ballad of dependency

Once my eyelids finally started to flutter, weakening, I settled on a poster of the image advertising a 2023 exhibition of Goldin’s work in Amsterdam, which I did not attend. Framed, it stood up to my shoulders if I stretched a bit and held it against my body – fit to hang over my bed like an offering at the altar, like a posterboard idol to whom I could profess my faith. The image, first published in Goldin’s 1986 book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, depicts a dark haired girl in a blue dress gripped in a hug by a seemingly disembodied, muscled arm, as her body fully blocks his own from the camera’s view. I don’t know the identity of either subject, but their pose still strikes me dumb in the dark of my bedroom each night, both going to sleep and waking up beside it. 

Maybe it’s the tangible affection that all of her work bursts with, how physical and present that scene feels decades after it’s been captured. Sometimes, in my half-asleep haze, I’ll blush at it like it’s a lover whose gaze I’m terrified to meet – a fiction of whom I’m constantly turning over and over in my head, shocking my system when they finally enter my same physical space. Even when similar displays have been reenacted in front of that poster, it never quite feels as perfect or as whole – though such devotion must exist somewhere in me, I assure myself, if only because it exists in that frame. I am both figures embracing just as I am Goldin’s tender eye, raising my lens because I know I am witnessing some type of holiness in motion.

As I introduce myself to fellow New Yorker and buzzy indie pop phenom Grace Ives – calling me bright and early from Los Angeles, where she partially relocated to work on her forthcoming third LP, Girlfriend – she almost immediately asks me to duck out of the way to see my poster of The Hug in the Zoom frame. I find myself dumbfounded, then, by not previously clocking the similarity between that image I stare at day-in and day-out, and the cover of Girlfriend, featuring a ghost arm wrapped around a pink-haired Ives, facing away from the camera and in motion like her counterpart in the original photograph. “I knew we couldn’t copy it verbatim, because she’s Nan Goldin, and that feels kind of gross,” she says, smiling past me at the wall through the screen, “but when I saw that picture, it made me cry, just from the love and mystery in it.” 

The visual homage is fitting, then, given the way Ives speaks about the follow-up to her 2022 breakout Janky Star in the same manner I write about the picture affixed to my wall. That “mystery” is a flirtation she dreams of but can never quite access, a crush she trips over her feet to follow around the sonic world she crafted with co-producers John DeBold and Ariel Rechtshaid, the latter of whom stands as alt-pop royalty for his help crafting career-best turns from the likes of Charli xcx, Kelela, HAIM, Sky Ferreira, and Blood Orange. “It’s such a world that we built, that has its own way of living,” she says, letting a gentle sense of awe seep into her voice every time she refers to said world, leaving the space between words to hold the force of her feeling. “If it was a person, I would be like, ‘I don’t understand you. You’re so cool. I want to be your friend, but you’re just a mystery to me.’”

“It’s like the album was my girlfriend, or something like that,” she laughs. “It can be a girlfriend, or just a good person to have in your life. It’s a great word. It’s casual but serious, and it’s also a temporary word. Usually, someone who’s a girlfriend doesn’t want to be a girlfriend forever. It’s an album about a time in my life being kind of temporary. It’s something that I can move through.”

In Grace Ives’ step into that mysterious unknown, her work emerges as something not exactly broader, but fuller – feeling like the next logical step in “leveling up,” as she puts it, from the tightly-wound, almost entirely homemade tracks populating Janky Star and her first record, 2019’s 2nd. Following the end of her tour for Janky Star, she found herself with a “loose grasp on my own purpose,” working in a “more depressed way” as she spouted random voice memos with song ideas that went nowhere and found herself drinking to extremes with little to ground her. Soon after making a conscious effort to get sober midway through 2023, she knew her creative process had to shift along with her personal life, coming to the conclusion that solitary attempts to execute any half-baked ideas on her Roland MC-505 would likely remain fruitless: “I had been so limited in my arsenal of sounds. I’ve kind of been confined to my own home studio, which is just my laptop and a couple of synths – which I love, they’re not nothing – but I didn’t feel like I was making an album [this time] until I started working with John DeBold.”

Ives makes clear her appreciation for her other collaborators on the record (Rechtshaid “saved my life on this album,” she assures me), but also insists upon mentioning DeBold in every retelling of a moment where inspiration struck or a once-formless notion of a musical idea finally started to take shape. With DeBold, Ives realised “how good it feels to have support in making music: that it’s not just voice memos in my back pocket, and these are songs that actually needed to come out of me. I think it took a while, because I was scattered mentally, and it wasn’t until I started working with John that I realised that I had stuff to talk about and I had music to sing.” First, she made a decision to start consciously treating her process of music-making like a full-time job, as it had strangely and suddenly become, and fled the East Coast to work with DeBold at Los Angeles’ Heavy Duty Studios, frequenting “a really beautiful [library] in Glendale that I loved” to put some structure in place within the writing process. 

“I didn’t want to try to overcomplicate things and/or make my words so vague in order to avoid saying how I actually feel,” she says now of her daily writing field trips amongst other people with their heads down for school or their day jobs. “I have this horrible, capitalist way of thinking about working where I’m like, ‘I’m not making enough, you have to have something to show for it.’ I was doing all these little poetry exercises and it helped me stop shaming myself for not having produced so much writing, because thinking about it is a part of the process. I just procrastinated out of fear that it won’t be perfect, but you have to try it in order to get good.” Then, with workable songwriting ideas in place, she and DeBold entered the studio to hit up against the crowbar that would fully expand the record into a showcase of what Ives’ songs had always been capable of: physical analogue instruments.

With the tangible sound of the various basses, guitars, drum kits, organs, and tack pianos that lined the walls of Heavy Duty comes the widening of Ives’ sonic world, injecting a spirit of joyful experimentation into strings of lyrics begging for connection, for movement, for permission to act out as the world crumbles around you. As with all of Ives’ work, the result is inventive, but never shambolic – a precise line to walk that she credits to a lengthy editing process. “I think my music and my writing can be a little sad, a little gloomy,” she says knowingly, emphasising that, despite her past working methods existing completely in a digital space, she plays almost every instrument on the final mixes herself. 

“Making beats on different drum machines and playing a pump organ and having these really brand new experiences created this different way to work,” she says. “We were trying everything and then deleting 60% of it. I kind of felt like a kid, especially with John, where we have this similar, naïve ambition that is really helpful and really works for what we do.” There’s no fear when the dread of failure doesn’t enter the picture, no shame when you don’t know the depths of feeling you’ve yet to uncover through sound.

The results feel just as fearless as the pair’s production methods would suggest, as fans could attest upon the initial taste they received from Singles, a collection of three songs – “Avanlanche”, “Dance With Me”, and “My Mans.” Despite not serving as the album’s opening track, ”Avalanche” feels like our true entry point into the chaos of the emotional world of Ives’ making. It slides from the breezy and scattered dreamstate of actual opener “Now I’m” (“where it almost feels like the song’s on drugs,” Ives laughs while describing her thought process behind the running order) to the harsh, proverbial bleat of the alarm in “Avalanche” as its skittering, gasping pulses seem to shock her awake. 

She rolls her eyes jokingly at what she calls her “cowboy moment” in the verse following the song’s first chorus (“This is where I came from / I used to think out loud / I used to run this town”), but concedes that it depicts her rock bottom moment post-tour, thinking, in her own words, “Oh my God, I used to be so good at being alive, and I don’t even know who I am right now.” Even in those three preview tracks’ most daring production turns, she maintains a spontaneity that felt central to her writing in the first place, where a breathless laugh or ad-lib will glitch and the song will seem ready to collapse in on itself, or layers of synth will build with such intensity that threatens to blast through to the center of the earth – though Ives never falters beneath the force of the arrangements’ clatter. As ever, her voice, even at its breathiest or most distant, holds its place as her listener’s tether.

Yet, of the Singles sampler, the mechanical power-balladry of “My Mans” feels like the clearest, most daring entry into the sound of the rest of the record, which not only plays with all the sounds the studio had to offer, but brilliantly blends them with samples DeBold dug up to stretch the texture of Ives’ previously contained style of creating. “We stumbled upon these sounds where it’s so hard to tell what [the sound itself] even is,” she marvels. “You’re wondering, ‘Isn’t that instrument live? Is it sampled or recorded?’ It felt like how I engage with art when I’m at a museum, where I’m asking, ‘How did they make this? Why did they make this? Why is it this big? What’s the meaning behind it?’ They were these weird new ways of generating sounds that feel homemade and emotional, that gave me a new way to interact with the music as a piece.”

And it’s true that in the emotional arc of the album, these sounds voice strains or joys unspoken – the strange alien voicings bleating behind Ives’ lead vocal over the groove of “Neither You Nor I”, the uncharacteristically acoustic skip of “What If”, the mid-section of “Drink Up”, where the song suddenly compresses itself into a seasick slosh, as if to mirror its narrator’s stupor. It feels eclectic and shockingly original, lending a soundtrack every aggressive and pliant version of how you can confuse your own identity while tying yourself to another person. In moments of painfully honest pleas for attention on “My Mans” (“Every singlе time it just defeats mе / You miss the point of me and pin me back / Anything to know I'm alive / Any little tell that I'm just your kind”), the vocal is right up front, droning directly in your ear, while “Garden” provides Ives’ denial of ever being your girl at all as her voice shuffles in half-realised whispers, as if you don’t deserve to hear her rejection full-on. 

It’s an album that feels shifts against its target’s reaction, growing and shrinking in sound to match the ferocity of the beast it faces – retreating in one turn and getting brave in another. In a musical sense, it sounds like an artist who has studied the giants of her craft for years and can take any shape of her choosing as a musician and writer coming into her own. In a lyrical sense, it’s a frame-by-frame exploration of a woman finding her footing in a world on the brink of collapse, threatening to spin fast enough to throw her into orbit. Listening as someone of a similar age living in the same world, it’s difficult to not latch onto the hand she extends.

“I was thinking about the throughline of the experience lived through these songs, and it just came back to my own identity as a person who kind of belongs to somebody,” she says, reflecting on her initial struggle to name the album and piece together a coherent story through the record’s running order. “That can be in a beautiful way, because I love my partnership, but the songs are reflecting myself as I relate to the other people in my life, who I am in other people's lives, which is…” She pauses. “I don't want to say a ‘flaw’ in my thinking, but I do tend to think externally. When I start thinking about myself, it’s through other people's eyes.” She smiles slowly, as if dazed, adding, “which is something I think I’m working on.” 

It culminates in the record’s noisiest peak, its auditory shove of a closer which – inexplicably, upon first listen – almost brought me to tears, ending the record in “a place of freedom,” by Ives’ own estimation. The song in question, “Stupid Bitches”, belies the flippancy of its own name by emerging as the moment Ives’ proverbial inner voice finally raises up to a howl, not in rage or in fear, but in palpable elation. It’s a brash noise pop earworm as much as it’s a dizzy walk home past a relationship’s end, with the immediate crush of heartbreak subsiding into the acceptance of being branded “tough enough to be replaced” or a “loser with an aching touch,” but also just belonging to yourself again. You’re not beholden to the swoon of infatuation or the dull ache of its death, only giving way to a lightness that holds in the center of the chest like you’re now free to be something, anything. It’s the dawning knowledge that in your search for identity, you were all of those shapes you tried to take – and that you, standing by yourself, stretch on for miles. 

“I think ‘Stupid Bitches’ is the happiest song I’ve ever written,” she says with no hesitation, having run through each section of the tracklist and sounding as though she’s been dying to exist in the thrall of this specific song once more. “It’s the feeling of euphoria that comes with realising that I don’t have to belong to anyone or change myself in order for people to like me. It’s my break from codependency.” 

Before our conversation, I scroll through Ives’ Instagram page and see a video of her dancing at the center of a roller rink in Bushwick – at a party I had a ticket to and bailed on once I saw the line to get in and my breath fogging up in front of me, deciding to go see my friends at another bar by my apartment instead of sticking around. I feel a pang of regret for my decision the second the video starts playing, as I watch Ives twirling around her laptop setup to a verse of “Stupid Bitches”, arms above her head. After following her work for the past seven years, a fact I only sheepishly admit to her as we’re about to hang up on the call and go about our days, that quick burst of a clip on my phone from a venue I usually make an active effort to avoid threatens to wreck me. Grace Ives, pop semi-superstar, indie-dance’s best kept half-secret, looks free. The usually confined formula of a four-minute pop song has rarely felt this boundless, this open.

“I’ve been trying to be more proud of myself,” she provides as her own admission between us, as she thinks about all that led her to this bizarre life she lives now, hearing her seven-year-old songs playing in stores or on the street, “so I just look back on it all with no judgment for how I was making songs. My first EP that I put out, I only released because my friend was, like, ‘Post that right now!’” She lets the rest of the thought slide out carefully, as if she doesn’t want to quite jinx it all by brushing it off: “This isn’t what I expected myself to be doing. I always kind of thought of my music-making as more of a hobby, something that I just naturally came home and did and kept it to myself, or showed to two people who I knew would be like, ‘Great job, Grace!’”

“In the older songs, I hear what I wanted to make, and I used to be so limited in what I knew how to do, but it’s cool to hear myself do that,” she says with no annoyance or regret in her voice, only what she’s termed as her naïve ambition to create until someone forces the breaks on. “It’s a craft, it’s a skill. It’s nice to pat myself on the back after making this record and be, like, ‘Good job, Grace. You’re getting better at this, just naturally.’” She puts a closed hand with pointed fingers up against her face, letting her palm open towards the ceiling: “I think of it like starting small and then opening, opening, opening, opening – like stop-motion [animation] of a flower blooming.”

The metaphor feels fitting for an artist once catching ears due to the constraints she defied, building something as infectious as “Icing on the Cake” or a devastating admission of affection like “Anything” in bed from nothing but a Groovebox and an unsmotherable instinct only meant as an after-work hobby, and then watching it grow into a vision of a girl spinning in the center of the roller rink lights. She’s both figures in motion on my wall, as well the tender eye that captures and sings it all. I make a silent vow in front of Grace Ives, with the eye of Nan Goldin boring into the back of my head, to spin in front of The Hug every time the blush creeps up, like that movement will shake the untapped devotion in me loose. There’s no shame when the depths of feeling lay dormant within you, when your feet make you holy in motion.