The New York singer and producer tells us how the bitesize, booming songs of her latest album Janky Star chart her crash course in drinking, drugs and the music industry
Being a burgeoning pop star is a thorny business. In 2019, when she released her debut album 2nd, New York’s Grace Ives was barely working within the confines of the music industry: she had made the album on a Roland MC-505 that she bought after seeing MIA use one; it was released on the experimental indie label Dots Per Inch, best known for bizarro pop acts such as Lily & Horn Horse and Lucy. In that world, everyone is friends, and people put out records for the love of it. So when Ives began shopping her second album, June’s Janky Star, to a slightly higher tier of indie label, it felt the same. “I was talking to my lawyer about deciding between two labels, and I was talking about one and I was like, ‘It’s cool, because I kind of feel like they’re my friends,’” Ives recalls over video from her apartment in Brooklyn. “My lawyer was like, Oh, Grace, no …”
Back then, Ives says, she was “excited and naive and also very impatient” to release Janky Star. “I didn’t realise the business side of music is so … like, you can be wined and dined and made to feel like a rockstar – and it can all be fake. That’s an easy word to use, but yeah, fake,” she says. “You get the support of a label, which is amazing. But you’re on your own, mentally. I didn’t know what it meant to own your masters or anything like that – the whole process of getting signed was so new to me. I thought that it was all lovey-dovey, but it’s business.”
