While she has been performing and recording for several years, Ices gained prominence when her song "Love is Won", from her second studio album Grown Unknown, was played over the closing credits of the second-to-last episode of season one of HBO's Girls on June 10, 2012.

[3] Her mother is a photographer and book binder,[4] and Ices says that her father has been a source of musical inspiration throughout her life, encouraging her to write her own songs from an early age.

In 2008, her first album, Necima, was released in September of that year, produced by Nicolas Vernhes at Rare Book Room Studios in Brooklyn, New York.

The music webzine Pitchfork wrote of the album: "When Ices and Vernhes find a creative symbiosis, usually on the record's shorter, pop-leaning tracks, the results are spectacular.

"[8] Critics compared her singing favorably to that of Kate Bush, and more contemporary artists such as Feist and Bat for Lashes, as well as Tori Amos and Cat Power.