Grace Ives

A dorm room, a drum machine and a graphic design degree

Ives was born in New York around 1995 and raised in Gowanus, Brooklyn, in a household already attached to the business — one parent a cinematographer, the other a creative director. She went through the School of Rock programme as a teenager, then left the city for the Maryland Institute College of Art to study graphic design before transferring to the State University of New York at Purchase. The music began there, in a dorm room, and it began on hardware rather than a laptop: a Roland MC-505 groovebox and a microKORG. Those two machines set the shape of everything she put out for the next decade — short, dry, tightly sequenced songs with nowhere to hide.

A debut EP, Really Hot, arrived in 2016. The first album, 2nd, followed on 22 April 2019, self-produced, and landed her on Stereogum's Best New Bands of 2019 list. She still lives in New York, now in Queens.

Janky Star, then three years of nothing

The second album, Janky Star, came out on 10 June 2022 and was given Pitchfork's Best New Music designation. She played Lullaby on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that August and supported Lykke Li across North America. Then the output stopped for three years.

The reason only became public around the third record. After touring Janky Star in 2023 she went into recovery. Her own summary of the period before it, given to Exclaim!, is blunt: "I was drinking, lying, and hiding." The practical consequence she describes is editorial rather than spiritual — sober, she can assess a take on its merits instead of swinging between self-loathing and chemically assisted certainty. The Guardian's review of what came next called it a sobriety epic, and that is more or less how she talks about it herself.

Girlfriend

Girlfriend was recorded between 2023 and 2025 in Los Angeles, co-produced with Ariel Rechtshaid and John DeBold, and mixed over sessions near Buffalo. It was released on 20 March 2026 through True Panther Sounds and Capitol: eleven tracks, 36 minutes, with Ives playing a large share of it herself across synthesisers, pianos and strings. The structural change is audible. Where her earlier songs rarely ran past three minutes, these work as small suites, with live instrumentation pushed up against the sequencers.

Three songs — Avalanche, Dance with Me and My Mans — trailed the album in late 2025, with Stupid Bitches following in February 2026. The reviews were close to unanimous: the record sits at 86 on Metacritic. Pitchfork gave it 8.4 and Best New Music, with Hattie Lindert describing a razor-sharp, refreshingly self-serious album that "feels perpetually airborne". Laura Snapes scored it 80 in the Guardian, filed under the headline "bedroom-pop auteur goes widescreen", and placed it alongside Lorde's Melodrama and Sky Ferreira's Night Time, My Time. Still Listening read it as lucidity arriving after a long stretch of instability.

Thematically it is an attempt to reconcile things she had treated as mutually exclusive: a relationship without the loss of autonomy, sobriety without the loss of pleasure, reliability without the loss of freedom. Her phrase for what the clear-headedness bought her is permission to take up space.

Learning to work with other people

Before the 2026 tour she rehearsed in Los Angeles with a band — the first time in her career she had played with other musicians rather than triggering everything herself. She has framed accepting that help as the harder of the two changes. On the road the setup settled into a two-piece, which she has said feels liberating rather than constraining after years of solo shows.

She is also candid that the scale of the thing was never the plan. "I wasn't like, 'I want to be a pop singer!'" she told the Needle Drop. "But if this is my life and I'm doing it, I'm going to be okay emotionally no matter what." The pink hair dates to September, after the mixing sessions: "I saw a picture of myself in high school with faded pink hair. I was like, 'Why didn't I just keep doing that?'" Her line on the touring itself is the least romantic thing in any of the interviews: "I forget that playing a show is fun. Touring maybe is hard, but playing a show is fun."

Where she stands now

The headline tour opened on 17 April 2026 in Philadelphia and ran across North America into May, reaching Music Hall of Williamsburg on 21 May, before European dates in June that included Primavera Sound in Barcelona on 6 June and Village Underground in London on 16 June. Support work followed. She opened for Robyn at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto on 15 September 2026 — one date on the Sexistential Tour, and the booking she has singled out as the clearest evidence that the record had landed. She played All Things Go across the weekend of 25 to 27 September, including Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland on the 26th, and is booked for Corona Capital in Mexico City between 20 and 22 November.

Everything after that is a step up in room size, and almost none of it is her own bill. She supports Gracie Abrams at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto on 18 and 19 February 2027, State Farm Arena in Atlanta on the 23rd and 24th, Spectrum Center in Charlotte on the 26th and 27th, and TD Garden in Boston on 1 and 2 March. She then joins the European leg of Olivia Rodrigo's Unraveled Tour, starting with two nights at the Avicii Arena in Stockholm on 19 and 20 March, four at the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam, two at the Olympiahalle in Munich, and five at the O2 in London between 5 and 12 April. Roughly two dozen dates are on sale, nearly all of them arenas, for an act whose own headline rooms in April were still measured in the low hundreds.

What the current show actually is

The 2026 tour ran tight. At the Bluebird Theater in Denver on 27 April she was on at 9pm and off at 10.05 — 65 minutes, sixteen songs and a single-song encore. The order has held steady across the run: Avalanche opens, then Dance With Me, Icing on the Cake, Drink Up, Trouble, Fire 2, Now I'm, Shelly, My Mans, Mirror, Babyyy, Neither You Nor I, What If and Garden, with Lullaby closing the main set and Stupid Bitches as the encore. It leans on Girlfriend but pulls from all three albums.

Reviewers have fixed on the same detail: it is played, not triggered. Writing about El Club in Detroit on 21 April, Radio Amor noted live electronic drums, bass and banks of synthesisers in place of backing tracks, with Ives moving to piano for the quieter songs, and described a thin crowd that was nonetheless fully committed. Two nights later at the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis — sold out at a 250 capacity, with Whu Else opening — Reviler concluded that "the live drums especially propelled the songs past their studio versions", logged a chorus of "we love you"s between songs and the loudest receptions for Shelly and My Mans, and called it an artist about to break large playing a slightly too-small room.