Grace Ives on Gear, Sobriety, TikTok, and Chronicling the Crashout

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Here's what we're up to today: Earlier this week I hopped on a call with Grace Ives, and upon her giving me a ring we both expressed surprise that our numbers were in each others' phones still from the last time we talked. Waaaaaay back in 2019, I went over to Astoria to profile Grace after really getting into the M.I.A.-on-Arbutus-isms of her excellent record 2nd. In the years since, Grace's stature has only grown alongside her all-left-turns, puckishly melodic take on synth-pop; her latest, Girlfriend (which is out today), might just be her best yet. I had a great time catching up with Grace about her developing craft and a whole other subjects, check it out:

Talk to me about your last four years in the wild before this record came together.
I got off tour for the last record, and then I was being a little party monster—but, like, a "party alone" monster. I ended up digging myself into a little hole all by myself, where I wasn't being a good friend or girlfriend—or good to myself, really. While that was happening, I was not so focused on music. I was still thinking of it in this young, hobby-ish way. By the time I was going to L.A. to do a producer tour, I was a couple months away from being sober. It was a little pre-actually making music, which is cool. The timing of everything worked out in my favor, because by the time I went to L.A. to start working on my demos and making them real with John DeBold, I was much more focused and present, and actually able to work with another person and take everything seriously.

John and I started in early 2024 and worked on it for a year and a half together. We needed a last little push over the mountain, so we reached out to Ariel, and he helped us clean it up a little bit and trim the fat—to make songs into better songs. Then we went to Tarbox Studios, which is Dave Fridmann's studio in Cassadaga, New York. It was amazing. I was unaware of the legend of Dave—his lore, and how influential he is. I had no idea. We finished up there all together, which was a really sweet ending, and that was it. It's been a constant slow build-up to the last year of being done with it.

I went to Dave Fridman's studio a very long time ago, when I was doing a story on MGMT. He's the kind of guy where you're like, "These guys are usually pretty normal, but it'd be funny if his house was a little wacky and strange." And it kind of is!
It was like summer camp. I was never a camp kid, but I imagine this was what it felt like. Dave is assisted by his son John, and his wife comes in and out—she manages him and runs their social media—so it felt like family in a sweet, normal way, but the backdrop is endless instruments that you didn't even know existed, and the main room is huge with a disco ball.

It really was an amazing example of teamwork. I've never worked with so many people at once. Dave and his son would work on a mix while we'd work on finishing up the last couple songs. It was John in one room and Ariel in the other, and I'd float in between them being like, "No, don't do that," or, "I want to do this," or, "That's amazing." It was kind of surreal to be like, "Whoa, these guys are all working on my music." Everybody was on display in terms of how hard they're working. You can literally see everybody's focus, and it was pretty dialed-in. It can be hard to believe that all these people care, but when you see it happening, it's pretty amazing. I'm so grateful to all of them.

We were playing badminton when we needed a break. I was playing with synths just for fun while John slept in a sound booth, because he and Ariel were like, "We don't need to share a room. Ariel's funny like that. My boyfriend came with me, took photos, and got to be a part of the process, which was the best. I hope I can work with Ariel again—which, he and I are friends, so that's up to both of us. But Dave and his family are just kind and funny. We saw local bands and sat around campfires. It was so special, I want to go back so badly.

How long have you been sober for?
Two years and eight months. I'll be three in June.

Talk to me about creating work under your sobriety.
I was doing the college thing of thinking that weed or drugs would make me more creative. It's so crazy to not be like, "I'm gonna smoke and see how much I like my idea that I did when I was high yesterday," but the clarity is unfathomable—it's like learning the truth. I thought that all these other things had to happen chemically, in my body, in order to get to a good like place for writing, and it's the opposite. It's fun in moderation, but for people like me, moderation is not an option.

The press materials mentioned this record "chronicling the crashout." Talk to me about embracing that level of vulnerability in your music. It can be a tough thing to do regarding any level of sobriety.
The risk is being embarrassed, which is the only thing that's held me back in the past—sharing, being open and true and real with people in my life and with myself. What's stopped me in the past is the fear of not being understood—of feeling a little rejected or people not caring. When it comes to trying to make someone like you, I'm thinking of the classic scenes in dorky high school movies where the narrator is saying something about their life to the popular girl and she's like, "Um, okay, weirdo." And you're like, "Wait, but I just told you a secret!"

I've started to try to drop any kind of act. I struggle with confidence and self-acceptance, but if I'm just honest and real with the people that I'm interacting with, then it can only do me good in terms of getting closer to being more comfortable with myself—and I think that's happened, and I think that it's been fruitful in my willingness to begin working with other people rather than working alone. In order for that to go well, they have to be in on it, and not in a fake way. It's not like therapy, because it's like friendship, and I've like seen myself make friends out of this process because I was open to actually connecting with someone and not being so closed off.

Let's talk about how things have progressed for you sonically.
This is the first time I didn't track things out on my 505. I went straight into working in someone else's studio and ended up having to be like, "Do you have a 307?" I've always felt so limited in what I can do alone. I know how to record sound into my computer, but I don't really know how to make it sound excellent. I've never really gotten that complicated in my own production—well, that's not true. I love to add different sounds, but I don't get complicated in my home setup and how I'm recording these things. I'm in a small space, and I can get pretty overwhelmed and frustrated by my own limitations, which have helped me in the past—having a couple of limitations and rules that you have to work your way around. It's made my music what it is.

This time, I was going into somebody else's studio with my demos, which are just me and my journal, and that's what we had to go off of. Communicating what I want taught me that what I'm hearing in my head is actually possible to execute almost perfectly. I've never known how to do that, so having somebody there showed me that the sky's the limit in terms of what sounds you can find, on the computer or even out of pans and buckets. It was like being a kid in a candy shop at first, because there were all these actual live instruments where I was like, "Oh, I want to play that."

I don't really play enough in my music. I love playing walking parts on the piano, I've done it in the past, but the keyboard on my 505 is so small that I haven't really been able to flex in terms of piano-playing abilities. This time around, I got to dream as big as I want, because the people I was working with were so willing to hear what I'm hearing, and they're really good at finding the right words to get that out of me. We speak the same language. I wanted to feel like the lights go off, and they knew what that meant—or, they had their own version of it, and it turned out that theirs was the right thing in that moment. Having three minds working on my music like was insane when I've been just soloing it out forever.

Let's talk about gear.
I just bought an OB6 and another thing that I kind of want to gatekeep, but I'll tell you, which is a Virus bass. I'm obsessed with it. Gear-wise, I know what everything's called now. We had a pretty steady rotation of gear because we were working in John's studio at his house, but also a lot of the time we worked in Burbank at the Heavy Duty studio, because I'm signed to them for publishing. I started remembering what things are called and what they sound like, and so quickly was I able to be, "There's a DX7 sound that would actually be perfect for this," or, "No no, the pump organ is too airy. I want something harsher." I started to build a sonic library in my head where I could pull up sounds in there that are there in real life.

I play with machines I've never played with before, obviously, because I haven't really played with much. But there's post-effects and effects racks—a whole other world that I didn't even really know about. And when you go to Dave Fridmann's, that is the juice of it. His studio is analogued-out and is amazing. But in Burbank, I was like, "Oh my God, why does that sound so good?" And it was like, "Because we sent it to the AMS rack, and it's my favorite reverb ever"—which, I had no idea that I could have a favorite reverb.

It's just all new stuff. The Polysix was a big one. The OB6 was a big one in the beginning too, because John was borrowing one from a friend so we laid down a lot of the songs with that. There's this Oberheim drum machine that we used a lot. I now know what I want for my own studio, whereas in the past I was like, "I should get a Juno, because everybody seems to have one." And I love my Juno, I'm not gonna shit on it. But the world is huge in terms of gear. Fucking Facebook Marketplace is amazing for gear.

I'll be honest—I've been locked out of my Facebook for four years now. I get reports from my friends who are still on Facebook being like, "They got crazy shit going on over there"—but I can't see it, and I'm not going to create another account.
Oh my God, you might have to. The O6 that I just got was for $1000 less than it was selling for at Perfect Circuit.

When we last met up in person, it was maybe a year before COVID. You were getting a lot more attention for your music at that point, and after COVID happened there was this widespread thing amongst the music industry for a lot of people whose careers were just taking off, but suddenly they were ground to a halt. Obviously, you recovered quite nicely from it. But I'm really curious to hear you talk about navigating that funky experience, career-wise.
It was definitely weird. It slowed down everything, but obviously not the process of actually recording music. I'm not an engineer. I can pump out demo after demo, but they might not make the record. Everybody was losing their jobs as musicians, and at the time I wasn't even really noticing that it was a job, because you're not really making that much money. Here I was, home all the time, and I'd never really been on like a big tour. It also created a weird hybrid collaboration with Justin Raisen, and it was masks in the studio. Oh my God. That was a horrible time. There definitely was a while where it was like, "Is this still happening?"

2020 was also the beginning of TikTok and seeing music blow up in that way—and me immediately being like, "I don't want to do that." But this seems to be how we're finding out about new musicall of a sudden, because we're all alone. I guess I was like, "Am I still gonna get to make music, or are we all too worried about dying? Oh God, do I have to write about COVID now?"

Have you been watching any movies lately?
Oh, that's a fun one. To be honest, I've been working so much that I've been just watching Breaking Bad for no reason. I don't know why I was called to rewatch it. I think I was looking for something to watch and was like, "I need to watch something that is the most popular thing so I don't have to think about it too much." But i've been watching some movies. I was just watching the Oscars, and I was like, "I haven't seen any of these, I don't know what they're talking about."

You haven't seen any of the Best Picture nominees?
I've seen, fucking...oh, I loved Sentimental Value. But I haven't seen One Battle After Another. I've been putting that off.

What's your relationship with social media these days? There's this expectation to use it for musicians, obviously, but a lot of people are increasingly like, "I don't want to you do this," which is very relatable. We both follow each other on Instagram, and you use the platform in a clever, funny way—not totally promotional.
I have such a tricky relationship with being told to post. If someone's like, "You have to post," I'm like, "I don't understand why I have to do this." And none of these boys making music have to post at all.

That's real. You don't see anyone putting a gun to MJ Lenderman's head!
No, literally. Mk.gee, even the poppier ones, they're allowed to look mysterious and whatever. So I get a little stubborn about that. I want to get closer to how I used to be with Instagram, where you'd be taking a picture in the app to post your car, or trash on the street. I'm not trying to romanticize my high school Instagram addiction, but I'm in a funny spot of having to post like it's a requirement. I wish for a future where the music speaks for itself—like a Mitski situation. She doesn't run her own Instagram, she boundaries it up. That's something I wish for sometimes. I also wish to just, like, not care so much. But it's hard to not care so much, so I'm slowly crawling towards just releasing my self-imposed inhibitions online.