IAN SWEET is reclaiming her storied identity

What was once a way for tortured artists and their fans to process their feelings calcified into a profitable subculture at the hands of the same platforms that made us feel like shit in the first place. For Medford, letting anguish define her became a reflex to process her emotions, and sometimes to shield herself from them. This approach ultimately warped her songwriting and, most importantly, her ability to process and compartmentalize the human experience.

The painful lyrics always came from a place of honesty, but over time, they didn’t tell the whole truth. Some days remind us of the indomitable human spirit; on others, it’s impossible to get out of bed. Over time, Medford increasingly struggled to distinguish between herself and her creative persona. Shiverstruck gently reminds her that if she can feel sadness so deeply, she can feel levity to that same extent. Vulnerable, truthful songwriting doesn’t inherently require despair.

While Medford can’t fathom writing songs without pouring her heart into them, she came to recognize that “saddest in the room” isn’t an award worth winning. From the van between dates opening for American Football, she confesses: “Being a woman is to suffer. I wouldn't be the artist I am without being so confessional and wanting to share these stories so that other women and other people can find a path through them and take what they want to from the songs. The most important thing is to have that authenticity, or else what's the point?”

Her friends were among the first to call out the disconnect between Medford’s music and the Jilian they knew. Despite her mental health struggles, which she’s openly spoken about in her music, she adamantly doesn’t let them define her. “On a daily basis, my friends say to me, ‘you're one of the happiest people’.” Throughout her career, she meticulously sculpted every emotion into a clean little package. By giving herself permission to live beyond insecurities and expectations, new record Shiverstruck sheds the polished emotional framing she once relied on.

Surrendering to herself and her circumstances, she cultivates a deeper compassion for her own messiness and a steadier ability to sit with discomfort, confident she’ll make it out on the other side. The album snaps into focus on “Jilian”, which calls out her impulse to romanticise life’s cruelties for the sake of authenticity, “like pain makes you more interesting.” And while the “bad sex and cigarettes” made for a cool character, she grew tired of wearing a mask of herself — “lying to yourself again.”

While living in New York City, she confronted the indignities of making ends meet as an independent musician. During her second year, she took a job as a children’s music teacher, ended a three-year relationship, discovered that AI impersonators were releasing official IAN SWEET releases on streaming platforms, and learned that a film production house was using her music in a trailer without compensation or permission. They offered payment in exchange for an NDA. She refused, all while the nagging impulse to start writing again began to tug at her.

Discovering that the reach and impact of her music stretched far beyond her control made it clear that she’d no longer subscribe to the unspoken rule that women artists must stay agreeable and take injustices lying down. These experiences also swung her music’s pendulum in the opposite direction, away from electronic textures and overproduction. “ I really wanted to have the listeners hear us in the room, hear the fingerprints and smudges still on the record. I just didn't want to clean everything up and make it so tidy and perfect, because that is what AI is.”

Upon moving back to her hometown of Los Angeles – “I always knew I’d move back to LA and rejoin forces with myself” – she carried with her a refusal to meet the expectation that women stay agreeable and take injustices lying down.

Shiverstruck carefully rebuilds the boundary between her persona and her project, mending the spots where the two had blurred and patching them over with renewed confidence. “IAN SWEET has taken on so many different shapes over the years. I eat, sleep, and breathe doing this. I go to sleep thinking about the songs, and I wake up thinking about the songs. Sometimes Jilian gets lost, and I'm not checking in on personal needs. I set out on this record to create that separation and make it feel more personally rooted in my existence outside the band.” That new outlook intuitively steered Shiverstruck away from documentation or storytelling and toward manifestation. In return, each track carries a new sense of trust, optimism, and zeal.

She became the girl in the wreckage on “987” and “Wild Heart” finally retires the honor she once championed proudly: “I’m the reigning champion/The saddest girl in the room/But I’ve given up the title now.” The scenario on “Criminal Kissing,” a “love letter to bad decisions,” accidentally materialized, too. Months later, she feels “so much differently about the songs now than I ever did. It's a fresh wound that performing it live feels so raw right now, and it's so much fun and very cathartic.” The result is just as confessional as ever while preserving a necessary separation between the individual and the band.

Adopting a moniker often let her recast herself as the hero in moments when she balked, wade through emotions she didn’t feel ready to confront as Jilian herself, or offer plausible scenarios that her listeners could resonate with. “ Subconsciously, I've used IAN SWEET as a vessel for things I'm not ready to process as Jilian, and I use the songwriting and performance to organize my thoughts into the chaotic things, the messy things, and the things I'm not quite ready to touch or look at closer. When I play live, it all becomes very real.”

Wearing her heart on her sleeve keeps her open to new and evolving interpretations. One of her favorite parts of being an artist is letting songs shift meaning over time. “When I perform these songs, I wanna know they’re coming from a very honest place, and that’s what makes performing so special.”

In the past, she’d often go months without touching her guitar after completing an album cycle. Shiverstruck shattered that pattern. What she calls the “record of her dreams” transformed the way she tackles writing. “It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked and ruminated on lyrics,” she explains. “I tweaked those to death, and I wanna get those so close to like perfect in my mind. I don't want to look back on any of my lyrics and wish I said something different here."

Once she had adorned the finishing touches on the album, she noticed a new desire to keep churning out ideas. “ Sometimes after I make a record, I won't even look at my guitar or write a song for a long time. It was a heavy experience, and you have to step away. After I finished this one, I wanted to keep writing and keep making things immediately. I've really stepped into a place where I feel the best I've felt about my songwriting.” Shiverstruck dares to live beyond industry pressures and self-imposed boxes, in turn creating her most self-affirming album yet.