New Yorker Grace Ives broke out as a bedroom pop artist, self-producing 2nd, her 2019 debut, on her Roland MC-505 and fastidiously expanding her sound for 2022’s appealingly messy Janky Giant name. Her third album abandons caution in windswept, hyperdetailed songs that lunge by fancy wide metropolis streetlights and shimmer with cosmic fear.

Ives escaped her bedroom in better than one sense. Janky Giant name mirrored her pattern of a more healthy relationship to substances, yet she hit unusual lows after its free up, making sobriety non-negotiable. She went to put in writing in California, finding safety in a new context in build of in search of to interchange by myself at home. Her resolution and vulnerability gas Girlfriend, which shares the conspiratorial sweetness and damaged-jabber glitter of cult pop classics by Lorde (Melodrama) and Sky Ferreira (Night time Time, My Time).

Ives’ songs bubble with ingredient – Avalanche seethes with glitchy synths, roiling piano, titillating strings and EDM shards – but never smother her off-the-cuff vocals, which nudge melodies into earworms. There are nods to British club classics: Fireplace borrows the existential poke of Olive’s You’re No longer Alone; standout Uninteresting Bitches, a ecstatic exorcism, conjures up Basement Jaxx’s Where’s Your Head At.

Ives is candid about what she is exorcising. The lurching Drink Up exposes the self-bargaining mentality of dependancy, her fragmented traces suggesting any person conversant in sneaking around. “I’m no longer your sea of fancy,” she sings on Be concerned, referencing a notorious duvet by Cat Vitality, who has been originate about her own dependency complications. But Ives is moreover gentle with herself: on Backyard she is romanced by the chance of freedom “from the hell of my pride”, a sensation blasted via this bolshie, stunning rebirth.