IAN SWEET’s Sucker Hurts in All of the Best Ways

Jilian Medford’s vision of heartbreak is a physical one. Scraped knees, kisses with spit, salty lips and crashed cars fill in the details on Sucker, her fourth album under the name IAN SWEET. In a sea of indie pop with some lyrical poignancy, buzzing synths, reverb-heavy vocals and programmed drums, Medford distinguishes her songwriting by painting each scenario as ever so slightly nightmarish. With her last album, 2021’s Show Me How You Disappear, she established that speciality of dire, moving lyricism that pangs in your chest. But on Sucker, the struggles and breakups grow sharper and weightier. When things fall apart for the characters in these songs, it’s a knock-down, drag-out fight.

The strongest songs on Sucker arrive when central relationships experience death by a thousand arguments, where embarrassing memories and indignities culminate into sorrow and resentment. With an ambient-inspired guitar lead and woozy synths, “Comeback” reminisces about how poor it can feel to try and capture the attention of someone you love. Lines about playing dead in a pool reverberate through the whole song, giving it a haunting sensibility. On the title-track, with its slowcore acoustic guitars, Medford’s beloved spells her name wrong but it goes without mention. “Sucker” even manages to get away with pairing a burning hook melody with rote lyrics, one of the album’s sore spots. The closing ballad “Hard” has devastatingly simple language about having your thoughts occupied by someone bad for you: “Did you think of me on your way back to the city / While I was in the garden getting my hands dirty?”

With production work split between Strange Ranger’s Issac Eiger and Alex Craig, Sucker succeeds with temperamental synths, guitars that add a dreamy gloss and percussion that splits the difference between bedroom-pop programming and indie folk mutedness. It’s a familiar sound but it manages to excel because of the clear attention to detail Medford and her collaborators pay it. For example, “Clean” is a deeply crushing cut that almost becomes optimistic when a hazy electric guitar part begins a final minute turnaround. There’s the keys on “Emergency Contact,” which percolate and provide a nervous quickness to a song that captures reaching a dead end. “Fight” almost replicates the sound of a fluttering heart with its drums, which creates a real balance with the huge hook, one of Sucker’s best.

In contrast, a song like “Your Spit” stands out immediately in part because of its buoyancy. Medford excels at creating a brutal vision of love, so the amiable moments on Sucker become a helpful reprise. It might be because of the song’s car imagery (“On the highway / Going 105”) but there’s a pop drive to “Your Spit” that sounds ready for a radio crossover. With Medford’s double-tracked, split-panned octave vocals, you can find a levity and a sweet excitement that isn’t on any other part of the record.

The messy, fun “Smoking Again” isn’t particularly cheery, but Eiger and Craig manage to supply Medford with an anthemicness that’s needed. Much of this comes with drum programming—it starts nicely with a fill—that adds a jubilance to the consistent bummer of the lyrics, recalling the danciness of later Kississippi or the lushness of this year’s record by waveform*. The clearest analogous act for what IAN SWEET is doing is feeble little horse, where lead singer Lydia Slocum adds knotty, sickly details to the band’s garbled, infectious noise-pop. If that textured, dense indie pop is dime-a-dozen these days, Medford knows how to create images that ensure these songs stick.

After hearing account after account of desolation on Sucker, it becomes clear that Medford has to express herself to relieve all of this aching. “What if I die with this song in my head and I never get to sing it?,” she asks on “Bloody Knees,” where shoegaze guitars and whispered harmonies cohere with a punching drum machine. With her viscerally pessimistic, love-hate view of relationships, IAN SWEET steps above the standard moving, moody indie pop. This album hurts in all of the best ways. “You want to talk about love? What about when it hurts like hell?,” she poses at Sucker’s opening, her clear incredulousness as the ingredient that makes the album work so well. “Huh, what about then?”

Ethan Beck is a writer from Pittsburgh who is currently living in Manhattan. His work can be found at Bandcamp, No Ripcord and others.