Shapeshifter

"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 Sweet's debut album,' Shapeshifter', repeating it like a mantra.

This is Medford's 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 Scalise's playful instrumentation, 'Shapeshifter' becomes a celebratory purging, an album that finds humour in self-deprecation and vice.

Ian Sweet's debut interrogates existence through a candy-coated lens, their mathy precision scaffolding the chaos of Medford's personal neurosis and turning those anxieties into something hook-laden and relatable.