IAN SWEET
SUCKER
POLYVINYL
IAN SWEET has always been unabashed. Since the project’s 2016 full-length debut Shapeshifter, Jilian Medford’s musical landscape has been one of high-stakes surrealism, a world of knives and slime where Jesus appears in shimmering holographs and love can literally crush the people it surrounds. Composed during a period of intensive anxiety treatment, 2021’s Show Me How You Disappear channeled this imagery into pulsing synths and fuzzed-out guitars, a chaotic sound for unpacking emotions so overpowering that even breathing is too much. On opener “My Favorite Cloud,” Medford declares of oxygen, “I don’t fuck with the stuff, I don’t even care.”
SUCKER, IAN SWEET’s fourth and latest LP, feels those emotions in full. In fact, it revels in them. With the giddy highs and reeling aftermath of a relationship as a backdrop, it continues Show Me How You Disappear’s journey of personal growth by chronicling the twin aches of opening up to love and healing from it. It also finds Medford yet again exploring the ramifications of not breathing. “Smoking Again” takes the self-destructive bent of Disappear to new heights, but the tone is more pop catharsis than indie confessional, the lyrics a tongue-in-cheek litany of bad behaviors instead of the tense admission of “My Favorite Cloud.” “Bloody Knees,” meanwhile, opens the album with a fear rooted in creativity and a new sense of self-preservation: “What if I die with this song in my head and I never get to sing it?”
This shift is represented in the sound of SUCKER, too, which sheds the noise of IAN SWEET’s earlier work to flow between dreamy shoegaze and indie pop á la Broken Social Scene. Medford has said that this poppier sound gives her some self-doubt, but it’s handled with confidence on SUCKER, pushing IAN SWEET’s sonic palette into lush new directions. “Your Spit” calls back to “Spit” from her 2018 release Crush Crusher, trading drifting surf-rock and the assumption a partner will leave for a hooky makeout anthem about understanding that they still might take off, but going in for a kiss anyway. “Emergency Contact” suggests Beach House, but Medford’s voice itself breaks the trance, building from a breathy whisper to a darkly ironic scream as she reckons with codependency: “I don’t mind! I don’t mind!”
Vulnerability is intoxicating, and ultimately SUCKER explores a love affair with emotional exposure itself. It’s hard work letting yourself be a fool for someone, and as Medford confesses to being one on the album’s title track, the tone builds from despondent to hopeful. It’s brave to be so open, beautiful to be so giving, and through heartache she finds agency, the acknowledgement of deserving someone who shows up on time and spells her name right. Even her cry of “I’m so far from healing” still implies being on the road. By the closing number, “Hard,” the shards of happy memories are carefully examined alongside painful ones—a road trip, a crying spell, an impulse to make someone miss the bus so they won’t be able to leave you behind.
In the end, like a centering ritual, we return to the breath. “You make it so hard,” Medford sighs—and then, she keeps breathing.
