IAN SWEET’s Jilian Medford throws herself headlong into life on ‘Shiverstruck,’ a spellbinding, emotionally electric fifth album that channels reckless romance, self-doubt, and hard-won self-trust into the liberating realization that we don’t need to have everything figured out. The singer/songwriter sits down with Atwood Magazine to discuss relinquishing control, laughing at the stories we tell about ourselves, rediscovering her instincts, and making a record that taught her how to get knocked down by life and keep moving.

Stream: ‘Shiverstruck’ – IAN SWEET

I think the story is me realizing that I couldn’t keep waiting to become some more figured out version of myself.

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The girl in the wreckage is still dancing.

On Shiverstruck, Jilian Medford has no interest in waiting for the dust to settle before she starts living again. The fifth album from her long-running IAN SWEET project catches her in motion – bruised but bright-eyed, romantic enough to make the same mistake twice, self-aware enough to laugh about it afterward, and increasingly willing to let uncertainty remain unresolved.

“A lot of this record is about learning to let life knock me on my ass a little and trusting that I can get back up,” Medford says. That readiness to be swept away – to stop bracing for impact and throw herself into life without trying to control the outcome – is the emotional core of Shiverstruck, and the key to Medford’s most liberated music yet. Restless, radiant, and heat-soaked, Shiverstruck is Jilian Medford at her most instinctive and alive – a thrilling IAN SWEET record charged with raw desire, reckless romance, hard-won self-trust, and an irrepressible appetite for whatever comes next.

You’re the girl in the wreckage
You’ve got 10 seconds
Now 987

So you dance across the room
Like a match struck in the dark
Told me not to make a scene
Then light me like a spark

– “987,” IAN SWEET

Released July 24 via Polyvinyl, Shiverstruck is, true to its title, a feverishly alive fifth album about relinquishing control without losing yourself in the process. Its arrival also coincides with IAN SWEET’s tenth anniversary, giving that newfound freedom the weight of a decade spent figuring out what this project could be – and what it could mean to Medford.

Medford began IAN SWEET during her college years, after moving from her native Los Angeles to Boston to study songwriting at Berklee College of Music and falling into the city’s DIY scene. Since then, the project has traveled through different lineups, cities, and sonic eras while remaining a space where Medford can be, as she puts it, “a little louder, messier, more dramatic than I am in real life.” Across that evolution, IAN SWEET has remained a vessel for oversized feeling, pairing Medford’s spirited, elastic voice with songs that stretch intimate confession into huge, hook-heavy indie rock and pop. Her music carries a live wire beneath its tenderness – humor beside hurt, sweetness beside distortion, and melodies that keep reaching upward even when the lyrics are staring straight into life’s mess.

Did I give myself away
Cried on the first date, made you pay
Ya i crack like porcelain
Now the light slips in
You see everything

Seasons change
I’m still the same
Left the door open
Just in case
you felt like comin’ back around
Some day

– “Shiverstruck,” IAN SWEET

Ten years in, Shiverstruck brings those qualities into sharper focus, giving Medford more room than ever to follow the contradictions, impulses, and emotions that have always animated IAN SWEET.

The album arrives three years after the maximalist pop rush of SUCKER, with Medford sounding less concerned than ever with what an IAN SWEET record is “supposed to sound like” – trusting her gut over outside expectations and the pressure to make everything fit. Written amid the end of a three-year relationship, a shifting relationship to the music industry, and an eventual move back home to Los Angeles from New York City, its ten songs emerged during a period when Medford’s life was changing on nearly every front.

“I think the story is me realizing that I couldn’t keep waiting to become some more figured out version of myself,” she says. “I felt pretty untethered, [and] at first I think I saw that as something I needed to fix. But making the record slowly became about surrendering to it.” By the time the record was finished, she had stopped needing that imaginary future self quite so badly. “I felt more like myself than I had in years,” she adds.

You can hear that realization beginning to take shape on opener “987,” where Medford introduces herself as “the girl in the wreckage” – someone who “always knew the endin’” and kept everyone guessing anyway. The devastation matters less than what she does inside it. With ten seconds on the clock, she dances across the room “like a match struck in the dark,” an image that captures Shiverstruck at its most elemental: Darkness interrupted by heat, motion, and one small flare of possibility. Medford’s beautiful voice, a shiver-inducing beacon of heavy emotion radiating over dreamy fingerpicked acoustic guitar, keeps the scene from collapsing under its own weight; even at her most exposed, there is humor in her delivery, electricity in the room. “Everything around me was changing, but I was still dancing around in the middle of it, trying to find something beautiful,” she explains. The record keeps chasing those flashes.

Sometimes that means knowingly running toward trouble. The record’s cinematic lead single “Criminal Kissing” grins straight through the consequences of hooking up with an ex, its restless momentum carrying Medford past every warning sign she already understands. “We’ve done this all before / Why not a little more,” she sings, before the chorus arrives at the hilariously hopeful question hiding inside a terrible decision: “But what if tomorrow / We get breakfast?” There is real sweetness underneath the recklessness. Medford wants the kiss, the memory, the possibility that this time history might bend differently – and she lets the song burn in that brief space before consequence catches up. It’s an instant album highlight, capturing the immediacy and emotional force of Medford’s artistry as she channels private desire into a charged, cathartic rush that aches like a confession and hits like an anthem.

Ha Ha, we’ve done this all before
Ha Ha, why not a little more
Ha Ha, what are we fighting it for

I swear I’m not this reckless
But what if tomorrow
We get breakfast
Do you miss it
The way I miss it

Criminal kissin
I swear it’s not that precious
But you’re makin me feel restless
Do you miss it
The way I miss it
Criminal kissin

Elsewhere, the smoldering “Silver Screen” aims its longing farther down the road. “Waited an eternity for just a moment on the silver shiny screen / You can’t blame me for wanting everything,” Medford sings over woozy synths and swelling instrumentation, giving her ambition the weight of romantic desire. Yet the song’s most revealing image may be its most ordinary: Dreaming of driving through Laurel Canyon in the California heat. The future keeps calling, but home has already begun calling louder.

“Lately I’ve been missing
the California rain
Watchin the windshield wipers
Wash the pain away
Tried to meditate, just fell asleep
Dreamt I was driving through
Laurel in the heat
I’m not so good at that kinda thing”

“Silver Screen” ultimately asks whether wanting everything has kept Medford from recognizing how much of the life she once dreamed about is already hers – and, in the process, lets the present finally compete with the future.

At the center of Shiverstruck sits “Jilian,” Medford’s sharpest and most compassionate confrontation with herself. Alone at a Saturday matinee beneath the “big city blues,” she begins dismantling a persona she spent years taking painfully seriously: “Sad singer / Such an idiot / Bad sex and cigarettes / Oh it’s a cruel world you’re living in.” The self-directed critique signals a sea change in perspective: Medford can finally look at the patterns she once treated with such gravity without letting them swallow the person underneath.

“Very therapeutic and also very rude of me,” she says with a laugh. “I had spent years taking certain parts of myself and my sadness extremely seriously. Writing ‘Jilian’ was the first time I felt like I could look at those patterns and actually laugh a little.” Medford isn’t ridiculing the version of herself who hurt; she’s refusing to let that hurt remain sacred enough to define her.

Her gentle voice carries the same contradiction, moving through the enchanting song with a soul-stirring mix of bite and affection until she reaches the bridge she herself identifies as the album’s emotional key: “You wanna hurt, but not too much / You wanna feel, but not be touched.” In two lines, Shiverstruck exposes the impossible bargain beneath so much of its longing – wanting life deeply while still wishing you could control exactly how deeply it reaches you.

Jilian
Go on and tell ‘em that you’re sick of it
Sad singer
Such a hypocrite
You’re lyin to yourself again

Jilian
You talk like someone’s always listening
Like pain makes you more interesting
Oh, it’s such cruel world you’re livin in
Oh, it’s such a cruel world
Oh, it’s such a cruel world, isn’t it

The dynamic, achingly emphatic “Wild Heart” finally gives that bargain up. “I’m the reigning champion / The saddest girl in the room / But I’ve given up the title now,” Medford sings over a pulsing, propulsive soundtrack, the fire in the song matched by a chorus that refuses to sit still: “You can’t stop a wild heart from beatin’.” The declaration does not erase sadness; it strips sadness of its authority.

“I think I had unintentionally built part of my identity around being sad,” Medford says. “I don’t have to stop feeling deeply in order to not be defined by sadness.” That distinction opens the album wide. Shiverstruck never asks her to become less romantic, less dramatic, less hungry, or less susceptible to being knocked sideways by another person. It asks what happens when those qualities stop looking like liabilities.

I’ve been on standby
For what feels like lifetimes
Waiting for someone to call my name
Always a plot twist
Keeping me honest
But I’m hangin on, so far gone
Split like a second

I don’t even cry anymore
You’re not worth cryin’ for
Ya you’ll believe it when you see it
You can’t stop a wild heart
From beatin

– “Wild Heart,” IAN SWEET

By “Speed Demon,” the answer is racing down the 101 with the windows metaphorically blown open: “F*** the speed limit,” Medford repeats while synths swell and soar around a song full of faded stars, late nights, love, laughter, and dead-end streets. The sign she keeps searching for never comes. She keeps driving anyway.

That abandon extends to the way Medford made the record. Where SUCKER found her meticulously arranging every sound into place, Shiverstruck came from loosening her grip and following whatever sparked. Working with children during her time in New York helped return her to that instinct: “Children have absolutely no interest in whether something is cool. They either like it or they don’t,” she says. “They’ll sing something completely insane at the top of their lungs because it feels good and there’s no second guessing happening.”

Medford carried that curiosity into sessions with producer Ben H. Allen III at Maze Studios in Atlanta, keeping the imperfect edges when they carried emotional charge and allowing IAN SWEET to become a container rather than a permanent definition of herself. “It can hold parts of me without having to hold all of me,” she says of the project. “Creating that bit of distance has actually let me be more honest in the music because I don’t feel like every lyric has to become a permanent definition of who I am.” A decade in, that small piece of distance has given her room to get closer to the truth.

By the end of Shiverstruck, the girl in the wreckage has not rebuilt the world around her into anything neat or permanent. She has simply stopped waiting for certainty before stepping back into it. There are still bad decisions to make, exes to miss, impossible futures to fantasize about, and dead-end streets worth speeding down just to discover where they lead. What has changed is Medford’s trust in the person behind the wheel.

There’s a fire ragin’
In the back of my throat
I had to put it out
So now I just blow smoke
I’m the reigning champion
The saddest girl in the room
But I’ve given up the title now
Look what you made me do

I don’t even cry anymore
You’re not worth cryin’ for
Ya you’ll believe it when you see it
You can’t stop a wild heart
From beatin

Even when we think we’re dying, we keep livin just the same / The universe is always lying straight to our face…

– “La La Love,” IAN SWEET

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Visceral, spellbinding, and wholly liberating, Shiverstruck hits because its breakthrough is anything but tidy.

Medford carries desire, ambition, and self-doubt forward with her, but no longer treats those tensions as proof that she is doing life “wrong.” The music makes that realization exhilarating: Her voice rises with warmth and urgency through songs that smolder one moment and burst open the next, giving her innermost reckonings the scale of communal release. That is where the album reaches beyond Medford’s own story – in making room for growth that can remain messy and unfinished, and for the possibility that sweating every choice only keeps us from actually living.

“I hope people can find some version of themselves in it,” Medford says. “I hope people come away feeling like they don’t need to have everything figured out. You can be confused, make a bad decision, run back to your ex, change your mind, start over, get completely knocked on your ass by life and keep moving and growing.” That may be Shiverstruck’s greatest release: The recognition that a life in progress is still a life worth throwing yourself into completely. IAN SWEET sounds reborn here, though the breakthrough comes from Medford realizing she never needed to become someone else in the first place.

Been a good year for the dreamers
Who won’t get much sleep tonight
Been a good year for make believe
saw you on TV
for like the hundredth time

Been a good year for the sun
Goin down on everyone
Been a good year for faded stars
Makin out in bars
Racing cars on the 101
F*** the speed limit
speed demon

– “Speed Demon,” IAN SWEET

This fall, Medford will take Shiverstruck across North America on a headline tour, bringing the album to cities throughout the U.S. and Canada from October into early November.

Atwood Magazine recently caught up with IAN SWEET’s Jilian Medford to discuss letting go of control, laughing at the stories we tell about ourselves, rediscovering instinct, and making the record that taught her she could get knocked down by life without needing to brace for it first.

Stream Shiverstruck wherever you listen to music, and learn why the girl in the wreckage keeps dancing in our exclusive interview below!

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:: stream/purchase Shiverstruck here ::

:: connect with IAN SWEET here ::

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Stream: ‘Shiverstruck’ – IAN SWEET

A CONVERSATION WITH IAN SWEET

IAN SWEET (Jilian Medford): Hi!! I’m Jilian and I’ve been making music as IAN SWEET for about ten years now, which is kind of insane to say out loud. I think IAN SWEET has always been a place where I can be a little louder, messier, more dramatic than I am in real life. The music has changed a lot over the years but I think the thing connecting everything is that I’m always trying to make something that feels really honest. I write about the things I’m actively trying to understand, so fortunately or unfortunately you’re getting a pretty direct line into my brain activity. [laughs]

IAN SWEET: I think “23” from Shapeshifter still feels really special to me. There’s something about the looseness and weirdness of that era that I really love looking back on. “Dumb Driver” and “Drink the Lake” are really special to me too, I feel like I was really telling a story with those and opening up my world more and more.

IAN SWEET: I have a lot of love for Sucker – I think that record was me trying to regain some confidence and have fun again after Show Me How You Disappear, which came from a much heavier place. Sucker is really out there and maximalist to me and leaning into a lot more pop sensibilities. But I can also hear how much I was still trying to control things. I wanted every sound to have its exact place. With Shiverstruck, I wanted to loosen my grip a bit more and let the songs grow without forcing them into a box that made sense sonically.

IAN SWEET: I think Shiverstruck is the closest I’ve gotten to just letting myself exist inside a record fully. Show Me How You Disappear was made during a really intense period of my life where I was actively in an outpatient therapy program. I was extremely fragile during the making of that and Sucker was almost a reaction to that, wanting to make something completely different…I wanted color and confidence and fun. With Shiverstruck, I wasn’t really reacting to anything musically. I stopped asking myself what an IAN SWEET record was supposed to sound like

I trusted my instincts more. If something was a little ugly or imperfect but made me feel something, I kept it. I wanted it to feel physical and lived in. Shiverstruck lives on its own and it’s not a reaction to anything I’ve made before, it just feels very singular to me.

IAN SWEET: I think I needed to remember that IAN SWEET is something I created. It can hold parts of me without having to hold all of me. creating that bit of distance has actually let me be more honest in the music because I don’t feel like every lyric has to become a permanent definition of who I am.

IAN SWEET: Children have absolutely no interest in whether something is cool. They either like it or they don’t. They’ll sing something completely insane at the top of their lungs because it feels good and there’s no second guessing happening.

I realized how much that instinct is essential to making music and maybe somewhere I’d lost that along the way. After making music for so long it’s almost impossible not to start thinking about how something will be perceived or where it fits or what people expect from you. tried to bring that back into Shiverstruck, less judgment and more curiosity.

IAN SWEET: I think the story is me realizing that I couldn’t keep waiting to become some more figured out version of myself. There was so much change happening at once. My relationship was ending, I was moving, my relationship to music and the industry was changing and I felt pretty untethered. At first I think I saw that as something I needed to fix. But making the record slowly became about surrendering to it. By the end of making it I felt more like myself than I had in years. Not because I suddenly had all the answers (I definitely do not) but because I think I stopped needing them as badly.

IAN SWEET: It’s being completely swept away by a moment instead of trying to protect or brace yourself for it. A lot of this record is about learning to let life knock me on my ass a little and trusting that I can get back up.

IAN SWEET: “The girl in the wreckage” is kind of how I felt during that period of time. Everything around me was changing, but I was still dancing around in the middle of it, trying to find something beautiful. It doesn’t really feel like a sad song to me though. There’s still so much movement and humor and life happening around it. The image of a match struck in the dark is this tiny flash of something bright in the middle of all the uncertainty. I think Shiverstruck is full of those little flashes, so “987” felt like the right place to introduce that.

IAN SWEET: “Criminal Kissing” is basically a love letter to making bad decisions…oops. [laughs] It’s about hooking up with an ex when you absolutely know better and then dealing with the emotional chaos afterward. I wanted the song to feel impulsive and not have time to think about all the things that could fall apart in the aftermath.

IAN SWEET: I’ve always been extremely ambitious. I’m constantly imagining this future version of myself where everything has finally clicked into place and then of course you get there and immediately invent another thing to reach for.

“”Silver Screen” is about how wanting more can be exhausting, but it’s also a huge part of what keeps me moving. I just think I’m getting better at realizing how much of the life I once wanted I’m already living and trying to be present in that.

IAN SWEET: Very therapeutic and also very rude of me. [laughs]

I had spent years taking certain parts of myself and my sadness extremely seriously. Writing “Jilian” was the first time I felt like I could look at those patterns and actually laugh a little. like, girl…come on, stop taking everything so seriously.

There’s a lot of love and softness in the song even though I’m calling myself out. I think I was finally able to see myself with some distance and realize that I didn’t need to turn every mistake or painful thing into a total life f*** up. Sometimes you make the same mistake twice. Sometimes you’re dramatic and it’s ok. There’s still so much life left to live.

IAN SWEET: I think I had unintentionally built part of my identity around being sad. when you’ve been writing emotional music for most of your life it can start to feel like pain is somehow part of the job title. “Wild Heart” was me realizing I don’t have to stop feeling deeply in order to not be defined by sadness.

IAN SWEET: “Speed Demon” ties the whole record together for me. It’s looking back on this period in my life and realizing that there were all these beautiful moments mixed into the really hard ones.

A lot of Shiverstruck is me searching for some version of myself who feels more figured out or grown up. And weirdly through making it, I think I did grow into myself more than I ever have before. Just not in the way I expected.

This song is kind of the visceral version of this realization. Driving full speed down a dead end street, screaming at the top of your lungs, having absolutely no plan to hit the brakes. There’s fear in that but there’s also freedom.

IAN SWEET: I really love the bridge in “Jilian”… “you wanna hurt but not too much, you wanna feel but not be touched.” That really kind of sums everything up.

IAN SWEET: Neko Case has been a huge north star for me lately. Blacklisted was a record I kept coming back to while making Shiverstruck. The Carpenters are always there, too, I could listen to Superstar a million times and it would still completely destroy me.

I think what I’m most excited about right now is trusting my instincts more and not overthinking where something fits. Making this record reminded me that the best stuff usually happens when I’m experimenting and following whatever feels exciting in the moment.

IAN SWEET: I hope people can find some version of themselves in it. Making this record taught me to trust myself again. I made a record that actually really excited me. I think I had forgotten how important that was and I hope people come away feeling like they don’t need to have everything figured out. You can be confused, make a bad decision, run back to your ex, change your mind, start over, get completely knocked on your ass by life and keep moving and growing.

IAN SWEET: I’m always listening to Wednesday. I think Carly’s lyrics are some absolutely unreal, out of this world storytelling. I am also loving Jordan Patterson, the coolest voice in the game, she makes me feel like I’m back in High School again discovering Fiona Apple. I also really love Friko, it feels super nostalgic but brand new.. So much exciting new music is coming out right now!

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:: stream/purchase Shiverstruck here ::

:: connect with IAN SWEET here ::

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Shiverstruck

an album by IAN SWEET