James Ivy details debut album, The Seams

Following his early EPs, Good Grief in 2021 and Everything Perfect in 2023, and his collaborative project with Roy Blair, American Road in New Jersey, released earlier this year, Ivy has returned with what is described as a new creative chapter that sees him at his most confident. "Lima" arrives today as the latest preview of the collection of songs, capturing the anxiety that comes from not feeling like enough.

The Seams was made over two years, and is described as a "meditation on creative paralysis and personal growth". For this album, Ivy abandoned the computer-based process that he referred to for his earlier work, and instead wrote with an acoustic guitar in his bedroom.

"The Seams was an exercise in restraint for me," Ivy explains. "There's always going to be a pop music itch that I want to scratch and I felt like I needed to put a cone over my head for this album to limit how much I could scratch when I had that itch.

"I couldn't always go against my first instincts, of course, so the pop intuition slipped through the cracks anyway, but at least for once I wasn't over-indulging in writing songs for instant gratification," he continues. "What remains after pitting these two halves of myself against each other is still an album that I feel is very me, just more meditative.”

The Seams artwork