Before this year, Ivy last released new music in 2011 with the album All Hours. Now, 14 years later, Ivy has reassembled to share Traces of You, which came out September 5 on Bar/None Records.

What makes this album extra special is that it includes parts from one of the late members, Adam Schlessinger, who died from complications of COVID-19 in 2020. The other surviving members — Andy Chase, Dominique Durand, and Bruce Driscoll — wrote 10 brand-new songs that all incorporate parts from Schlesinger.

KEXP’s Roddy Nikpour spoke with Ivy about their collaborative approach, how Chase and Durand’s marriage may or may not be affected by a love of Tetris and a self-described “flute fetish,” and ultimately how the band had fun putting this record together.

“We couldn’t just leave [the demos] in a storage room,” Durand says in the interview. “We had to do something about it.” When it comes to writing around parts from their late bandmate, Chase adds, “You try every idea. That’s the wonderful thing about the digital era — there’s no limit. We pretty much exhaust all our creativity on every song, and then it’s a matter of subtraction.”

This is why the band adopted a “less is more” approach.

“There were songs where we would try to add a bunch of stuff and then realize we’d gone too far,” Driscoll says. “We’d realize that the first thing we’d done was the best thing.”

Related: Janice Headley talked with the band in 2023 about one of their iconic reissued albums, Apartment Life, which originally came out in 1997.

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photo by Michelle Shiers

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