Grace Ives says the realest version of herself is what people respond to as Olivia Rodrigo tour looms

Grace Ives is heading into a much bigger room. The Brooklyn artist, speaking from a San Francisco hotel room a few days after the announcement, said she is set to open for Olivia Rodrigo in 2027. The run will give her first arena-scale shows in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Munich and London next March and April. She called the news “pretty ecstatic” and said the whole thing feels “like the biggest present I’ve ever gotten in my life.”

“I don’t know what the appropriate reaction is,” she said. “I’m overwhelmed by the vision of what that looks like when I close my eyes. It feels so massive and exciting, like what I’m doing right now, but times 200. It’s the final stage artists work towards, and I get to try it out for a week or two. It’s the ultimate validation, like the biggest person in the world being like ‘I fuck with you.’”

The timing fits a clear upward run for Ives. Her third album, Girlfriend, arrived in March and drew some of the strongest reviews of her career, following 2022’s Janky Star and her 2019 debut 2nd. She first emerged by releasing music from her dorm, starting with ringtones and then an EP of nursery rhymes.

Even before the Rodrigo news, the demand was already obvious. Ives is on a current headline tour, and her London date next month is sold out. Onstage, she is drawing from all three albums, material she describes as messier than Rodrigo’s recent sonic drift, which she reads as a useful sign ahead of the pop star’s third album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love.

“I’m excited to hear the rest of Olivia’s new music because it feels like this [opener] lineup is pointing to something a lot dirtier and grungier than I would associate with her and her work in the past,” Ives said, pointing to other openers including Wolf Alice and Die Spitz. Rodrigo began with straight pop hits before leaning into rock territory more recently. “It’s cool that this is the music she’s excited by. It’s not super clean, and the landscape is sonically pretty diverse.”

That interest in a rougher edge lines up with where Girlfriend came from. Ives has described the period around the album as “gross,” and in a manifesto tied to the record she called herself a bad daughter, a shitty girlfriend and a disaster who had abandoned herself and her music. That crash out followed the success of Janky Star, which introduced many listeners to her blend of homemade synth-pop, electro-pop, pianos, guitars and her ethereal voice on songs like “Lullaby,” where she sang, “what a mess, what a lovely mess.”

With Girlfriend, she was not sitting inside that mess so much as trying to move through it. She said the record grew out of a “desperate search for a sense of self.” “I would find myself catapulted into things that have nothing to do with me,” she said. “But I needed to test things in order to see who I am. It’s the whole writer joke of doing it for the memoir. I feel like that might just be a thing that women go through.”

Eventually, she said, the performance of it stopped making sense. Stopping drinking and trying to be honest with herself and other people felt like a relief. “I didn’t realise how uncomfortable [I was]. I think it’s so much nicer to tell the truth, for me personally,” she said. “I’m an anxious person, and adding a fakeness on top of anxiety is just a recipe for bad art. I’ve definitely done that. I’ve made music from a place of not wanting to be true to myself, and it hasn’t turned out the way that I personally wanted it, you know? The best version of it.”

“[Supporting Olivia Rodrigo is] the ultimate validation, like the biggest person in the world being like ‘I fuck with you’”

To make that version of the record, Ives worked with Ariel Rechtshaid, who has credits with Charli xcx and Vampire Weekend, and John DeBold, known for work with HAIM and Dijon. She said the sessions opened up the sound and helped her write through a shift from murky behavior to a clearer state of mind. “John and I definitely did a lot of playing, we’re like two kids in the sandbox,” she said. “There was a lot of joy and a lot of acceptance between the two of us. And Ariel, he has a relationship with John where they’re like brothers, and I fit into that dynamic really well.”

At points, she said the process felt like “vulnerability bootcamp.” “All of a sudden it’s like, ‘Hey Grace, what were those lyrics that you were saying earlier that no one really liked, including you? Can you read them to everybody?’” she said, slipping into a deeper voice and acting it out. “I’m reading my bad poetry. That’s where the vulnerability came in. That’s the test of breaking through that wall. If you go through with it, then suddenly you are free to say anything.”

That approach is clear on “Drink Up,” where she calls herself a “little bitch” over a song that moves through bouncy, distorted and lush sections. “Drink Up exists in three parts and includes tempo changes, starts and stalls. When you try to record that, it can feel heady or like pretentious music theory. I feel like we got it to feel natural, and this song in particular, with all the mood changes to feel natural, it’s ambitious.”

The rest of the album follows suit. “Stupid Bitches” finds her singing “it doesn’t hurt me anymore” over clashing percussion and strings. On the glitchy “Avalanche,” she says she is “feeling sorry not sorry for the mess I made,” before a siren-like call. “My Mans” places her voice against the track with the steadiness of a religious chant before she pushes into a bigger pop chorus. “Every single guy I meet completes me/ I need a lover who can love me back,” she sings over swelling keys, and the pull of the line lands even if the narrator does not always seem reliable.

Grace Ives credit: Maddy Rottman

For Ives, the wreckage is not something to hide from anymore. “I think crash-outs show people who you are,” she said. “Or, even if it doesn’t, and it feels like a weird toddler version of you, tantruming that you wouldn’t wanna claim as your own… It’s easy to be like, ‘Oh my god, I was so crazy!’ But that was you. It’s good to lose your composure every now and then because you got it out of the way. People are complicated. And people should be allowed to be complicated.”

The attention around the Rodrigo support slot has also pushed her into fresh online chatter, with some publications naming her among indie acts who are about to “blow up”. Ives sounds wary of turning that into a story about transformation. “I have to be very careful to be true to myself and nice to myself and let myself be who I am,” she said. “Because I think that the realest version of myself is what people respond to.”

Grace Ives’ Girlfriend is out now via True Panther Records/Capitol Records. She is on tour now and will support Olivia Rodrigo in 2027.