Grace Ives - Girlfriend

Grace Ives used to make pop music in her bedroom. Charmingly rough, deliberately small, it was the kind of thing that lived on a laptop and owned it perfectly. 'Girlfriend', her third album, was produced with Ariel Rechtshaid and John DeBold, mixed by Dave Fridmann, and - as you might expect - it sounds like none of those earlier records. Instead, it's what happens when an artist with exceptional instincts for melody finally gets access to the people and the budget to realise them properly.

'Now I'm' opens the album with a statement of arrival that earns the title's implied full stop. The production is dense but airy - a Rechtshaid signature, familiar from his work with Vampire Weekend and Haim - and Ives's voice sits right at the front, closer and more confident than before. Fridmann's mix gives everything a slight shimmer. The prettiness here is not smooth or settled but fractured, catching light from odd angles.

The triple single release last October, with 'Avalanche', 'Dance With Me', and 'My Mans' dropping simultaneously, announced the album's ambitions. All three are built for repeat plays, each hooky enough to function as a lead single. Every track on 'Girlfriend' could be a single of sorts, but together, they're something more. 'Fire 2' and 'Drink Up' are just as immediate as the pre-release material, their melodies lodging on first listen and staying put.

'Girlfriend' is an album about taking up space, and the production mirrors the sentiment: where 'Janky Star' sounded deliberately cramped, here the arrangements spread outward, each instrument given room, each vocal layer distinct. 'Neither You Nor I' uses that space beautifully, the song expanding across its runtime from a close vocal and a single chord into something wide and layered.

It's an album packed with conspiratorial closeness, pop music that feels like it is being whispered to you specifically, but Ives has a lightness that her peers generally don't. 'What If' is a track built on uncertainty and possibility, and it manages to make indecision sound euphoric rather than anxious. 'Garden' follows with a gentler touch, something organic and unhurried amid the album's more propulsive tracks.

'Trouble' sits at the midpoint and serves as a pivot, darker and more textured than the songs around it, with bass pushed right to the front. It stops 'Girlfriend' from coasting on its own sunniness and introduces a tension that carries through the second half. 'Stupid Bitches' reclaims the energy with a title that promises antagonism and delivers something more complicated: a song about solidarity disguised as aggression, or possibly the reverse.

The leap from bedroom to studio has claimed plenty of artists before, stripping away the imperfections that made them interesting in the first place. Ives avoids that trap by keeping her songwriting instincts intact. 'Girlfriend' is the kind of record that makes its eleven tracks feel like exactly the right number; nothing is wasted, each song pulling its weight. When every track could be the single, the album becomes the point.