Shapeshifter

Ian Sweet started in 2014 with a string of text messages. Medford was a few days away from embarking on her first tour when the driver and drummer she recruited cancelled. Medford sent Ian Sweet drummer Tim Cheney - whom she barely knew - a series of desperate messages, asking if he knew how to drum and whether or not he would be willing to take two weeks off of life to go on tour. Cheney responded soon after with a simple: "Yes." Accompanied by Cheney and bassist Damien Scalise's playful instrumentation, 'Shapeshifter' becomes a celebratory purging, an album that finds humor in self-deprecation and vice. Ian Sweet's debut interrogates capital-e 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. And though the narrative of 'Shapeshifter' clings to an ex-lover, the yearning felt on this album isn't directed at a particular individual so much as it's