Grace Ives made two albums that felt like they were recorded in the margins, quick and instinctive and bracingly direct. Girlfriend, her third, sounds like someone who finally decided to take up the whole page.

The record arrived March 20, co-produced by Ariel Rechtshaid and John DeBold, and it announces itself differently from the first bars. Where Janky Star (2022) had a bristling, compressed energy, like Ives was cramming too many good ideas into too little space, Girlfriend opens outward. The arrangements breathe. The melodies land and linger instead of darting away. There is a confidence here that Ives has always had in small doses, and on this record she has stopped rationing it.

The backstory shapes the listening experience, though not in the way backstory usually does. Ives has spoken openly about the period of drinking and difficulty that preceded the album, and about becoming sober before writing most of it. But Girlfriend does not feel like a recovery record in the way that term usually implies. There is no performative catharsis, no grand statement of survival. What you get instead is someone who has figured out how to be honest in their music without making every song feel like a confessional. The sobriety freed her up to take space, she has said, and you can hear exactly what she means.

“Now I’m,” the opener, sets the tone immediately. It is spare and unhurried, Ives singing over a minimal synth figure, and the plainness of it feels like a choice rather than a limitation. By “Dance with Me,” the album is already doing something more interesting, Rechtshaid’s production adding layers that never crowd the song, always serving the writing rather than papering over gaps.

“Trouble” is where things get complicated in the best way. Ives examines her long-term relationship through the lens of her dependency, and the result is a song that does not assign blame or seek resolution. It just sits with the reality of how those two things coexisted, which takes more nerve than most pop albums bother with.

The closer, “Stupid Bitches,” released as a single in February, is the outlier in tone, soulful and a little theatrical, a good kind of weird that suggests Ives is still interested in surprising herself. The fact that it closes the record rather than opening it is the right call. You need everything that came before to understand why a joke this confident lands without deflating the whole thing.

What makes Girlfriend the record it is, is not any single element but the accumulated effect of Ives making decisions that prioritize honesty over palatability. The production is polished in a way her earlier work was not, and that could have been a problem. It is not, because the songs are strong enough to carry it, and because Ives sounds throughout like someone who knows exactly what she is doing and is doing it anyway, which is a much harder thing to fake than it sounds.

This is a record about finding your footing, made by someone who has found hers.