Shapeshifter

Description

I have a way of loving too many things to take on just one shape, Jilian Medford sings over and over again on the title track of the Brooklyn-based band IAN SWEETs debut album, Shapeshifter, repeating it like a mantra. This is Medfords thesis statement, a narrator to carry us through Shapeshifter, which is above all else a meditation on loneliness and displacement.

With Medford accompanied by drummer Tim Cheney and bassist Damien Scalises playful instrumentation, Shapeshifter becomes a celebratory purging, an album that finds humor in self-deprecation and vice. IAN SWEETs debut interrogates capital-e Existence through a candy-coated lens, their mathy precision scaffolding the chaos of Medfords personal neurosis and turning those anxieties into something hook-laden and relatable.