James Ivy Scrapped 15 Demos, Then Wrote His Rock Debut 'The Seams' in a London Studio

In 2023, James Ivy locked himself in a New York studio for an entire month and wrote 15 songs meant to be the foundation of his debut album. All of it got scrapped. "I was just making garbage," the New Jersey-raised singer-songwriter told The FADER bluntly. "I didn't have the tools I needed to make this album yet. I needed more time to shed my old skin."

This wasn't your average creative block. Ivy came up in the SoundCloud scene as an electronic producer, active in the jack dance scene—a world that in some ways served as a precursor to the later hyperpop wave. His solo singles leaned warm and inviting pop, a direction he carried through to his 2023 EP 'Everything Perfect.' But faced with the sprawling, undefined task of "making a debut album," he found himself stuck. "I'm indecisive about everything," he said. "I want to do everything, scratch every itch." Moving back home only made it worse: "I wasn't really living."

From the PC Music Mosh Pit to Rock Guitar

Ivy traces his musical origins back to PC Music. It might sound like a leap from his current rock leanings, but given the raw sincerity in SOPHIE and A.G. Cook's music—and the fact that A.G. Cook himself has always been a rock guitarist at heart—the throughline makes sense. In 2015, Ivy and a group of friends he'd met online snuck into a PC Music showcase at SXSW. "There's this video burned into my brain of us rushing the mosh pit during SOPHIE's set," he recalled. "That's when it hit me—I wanted to be a producer." Those were the years he first met this crew in person at SXSW in Austin, with his dad tagging along as chaperone the first year, and his mom the next. "My parents were strict, so seeing me meet these people through Skype and diving headfirst into music completely freaked them out," he laughed.

After high school, Ivy enrolled at NYU's Clive Davis Institute before dropping out to focus on music full-time. He's since racked up a solid body of collaborative work—opening for Porter Robinson on the Nurture tour, and teaming up with close friend Roy Blair on the side project American Road In New Jersey, whose self-titled album, released this past January, is steeped in dark, drone-laden textures and marimba tones. Ivy says working on that side project actually "unlocked" what his official debut needed to become.

Writing 'Bent' and 'Tear' at Studio 13 in London

The turning point came when Ivy went to London to visit an old friend, Ally Sianga (now of Been Stellar). The two ended up messing around in Damon Albarn's Studio 13. "It felt just like goofing off in a dorm room again, except now we were at Studio 13," he said. The album's backbone tracks, "Bent" and "Tear," were written there, and the big, cinematic emotion that defines 'The Seams' started taking shape in that same space.

"Putting Together A Device," one of the album's slower, more drifting tracks, sings: "You are who you were in your late teens / You're far from where you wanna be / When you're ripped at the seams"—lyrics that describe the labor of piecing something together while also echoing the years of stalling and circling that defined the making of this record. The lead single "Bent" opens with Oasis-esque strummed guitars and a low murmur: "I'm bent out of shape / And I don't recognize myself." As the drums grow fractured and frantic toward the end, Ivy shouts, "When you hold me like you would / And you take me like you should"—a mix of stubbornness and struggle that carries, underneath it all, a sense of release finally let out.

'The Seams' is out via FADER Label. Reflecting on the process of getting through his debut, Ivy said: "Maybe this is just the first step of the rest of my life. Just get the first one done."