On her fifth album, Jilian Medford reflects on inertia, heartbreak, and a cross-country move, setting allusions to intense feelings against subdued indie pop.
Jilian Medford’s output as Ian Sweet has followed something of a long conceptual arc. When she first began releasing music as a Berklee student over a decade ago, Medford earned a reputation for “sad girl” anthems built around dreamy, guitar-forward pop. Things took a turn on her best and most daring album, 2021’s Show Me How You Disappear; when Medford sang, “I’ve been waiting to tell you what it’s like to be alive,” it was a testament to the long road she took to finally flourish. The ensuing effervescence of 2023’s Sucker hinted that the journey paid off. But Medford also knows not all trajectories are linear: On Ian Sweet’s subdued fifth album Shiverstruck, she’s bailing on her plans, spinning PJ Harvey on repeat, and spending a lot of time in her own head.
On “La La Love,” the first song written for Shiverstruck, Medford is in the final stretch of a doomed romance: “Even when we think we’re dying/We keep living just the same/The universe is always lying/Straight to our face,” she coos over droning shoegaze guitar, her blinders up to the red flags. As an album began to take shape, Medford went through a breakup, her final impetus for making the permanent move from New York back to her native Los Angeles. That personal upheaval became the primary narrative basis for Shiverstruck: Across the album, Medford bemoans her “big city blues,” fantasizes about disappearing, and recalls falling asleep during a failed meditation session only to dream about being in Laurel Canyon. Shiverstruck regularly portrays Medford stalled in these nebulous in-between stages—“You wanna hurt but not too much/You wanna feel but not be touched,” goes the bridge of the self-dig “Jilian”—but it stops just shy of a significant breakthrough. For an album full of allusions to intense feelings, Shiverstruck’s mellow, midtempo pop and formulaic melodies don’t do much to translate that magnitude into song.
Medford has said that she “put in crazy amounts of time and energy” constantly revising Shiverstruck’s lyrics, often up until the moment she recorded them. You wouldn’t necessarily glean that by listening. The album too often falls victim to overused rhymes (“There’s a secret/And I keep it”; “Drivin’ full speed/Down a dead end street”); elsewhere, evocative moments are paired with deflating tropes, like when she pairs the line “got the love of a million mothers/Pacing in waiting rooms” with “my therapist says I shut down quick/and she can’t fix it with a prescription.” The pared-down acoustic opener “987” makes for a pretty enough Joanna Newsom imitation, until vague imagery (“You dance across the room like a match struck in the dark”) undercuts its impact. Medford has proven she can make a simple song feel striking—her 2023 sugar-rush “Your Spit” is a prime example—but Ben H. Allen III’s production makes even Shiverstruck’s catchiest moments thin and unaffecting.
Medford has described herself as “chaotic and messy” in her personal life, and Shiverstruck works best when she leans into these qualities, like on the I-might-hook-up-with-my-ex highlight “Criminal Kissing”: “For the record, I don’t kiss and tell,” she winks over propulsive drums. “If you think it’s such a bad idea/Why are you still here making it worse?” The rousing, propulsive penultimate song “Wild Heart,” meanwhile, offers a kernel of thematic redemption. “I’m the reigning champion/The saddest girl in the room,” she sings, “But I’ve given up the title now/Look what you made me do!” The song is both an acknowledgement of how far she’s come and proof that Medford is capable of going in a bolder new direction—and that she herself knows it, too.
