jasmine.4.t: The Best of What's Next

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In August 2023, Jasmine Cruickshank watched boygenius play songs from the record at Gunnersbury Park. She’d been a roadie and an opening act for Lucy Dacus before, but it was there, in London, where she met Phoebe Bridgers for the first time. Four days later, in Kingston upon Thames, Jasmine played a show of her own with Bridgers, Dacus and Julien Baker, who’d been playing back-to-back shows on the same day. “It was boiling hot,” Jasmine recalls, “and everyone was irritable and drunk, because they’d been queuing outside since 6 AM. But it was a good show.” She performs under the name jasmine.4.t, a loving wink towards trans for trans relationships. What nobody knew then, at that Gunnersbury Park show, was that jasmine.4.t would become the first British artist to sign with Bridgers’ record label, Saddest Factory. And it wouldn’t be long before Jasmine would decamp to Los Angeles to make her debut album, You Are the Morning, at Sound City with boygenius, Claud, E.R. Fightmaster and Becca Mancari.

Multi-instrumentalist and former labelmate Joe Sherrin (who performs as SLONK) had encouraged Jasmine to submit her demos to Saddest Factory. At that point, she was living in a “sketchy housing situation” and trying to find her feet, writing songs for You Are the Morning that never got recorded. Six months passed and the good news finally came, after Jasmine asked Dacus if she’d put the songs in front of her bandmate. And Dacus did, and Bridgers loved the music. But Jasmine kept it all hush-hush. “I didn’t tell many people. I didn’t want to jinx it. I wanted to manifest for it, privately, to come to fruition,” she says. Prior to Bridgers listening to the demos, Jasmine was performing at local prides around England; her dear friend Yulia made TikToks of her music for social media; and she played at Warrington’s pride, praising the town’s “awesome young trans community” who came together after Brianna Ghey’s murder.

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The last four years have been both devastating and life-affirming for Jasmine. Complications from long-COVID and a myalgic encephalomyelitis diagnosis left her bed-bound during the pandemic, and then she came out as a trans woman, and then a divorce forced her to rely on community, mutual aid and vacant couches. Once she moved from her hometown of Bristol to Manchester, she got busy living in the light that had long called to her, writing songs for everyone who propped her up, like “Best Friend’s House” and “Highfield.” Had Sherrin not put her in the direction of Saddest Factory, she likely would have kept true to her underground roots and put the You Are the Morning demos out herself. But it’s a good thing she didn’t have to; a project like this demands a rollout with every carpet color there is.

January is barely half-over, but You Are the Morning has been reaching the right people, sitting at more than 800,000 streams on Spotify just a weekend after its release day. Fans of boygenius have undoubtedly flocked towards jasmine.4.t’s music already, and rightfully so—songs like “Kitchen,” “Best Friend’s House” and “Tall Girl” are so rich with sincerity and massive passages of orchestral, crushing indie rock and stripped-down, ornately full-hearted singer-songwriter hardware that you’d be remiss not to trace the epic cathedrals of these 13 works back to the trio. And the tracklist gets tied together preciously by Jasmine’s voice, which possesses a tremendous breadth of intimacy and gets fleshed out through contexts of tender detail.

Last week, Los Campesinos! compared her to Elliott Smith. On the title track, she gets gentle like him, singing about regret and who we can, and cannot, save in life. The song is an act of resistance, and it’s an act of love. When Jasmine delivers the final verse—“If I stay, if just for one more year, to place your hair behind your ear, to stroke your wrist from left to right as you hold me in the morning light”—you’re probably already weeping uncontrollably. You Are the Morning very well might already be one of the best things any boygenius member has ever worked on; it’s an album that’s entered the lexicon of contemporary indie music with an extraordinary wellspring of urgency and compassion. The trans canon is fuller now that this album exists, that we have a couplet like “That I am in body a woman, that I am in soul a woman” to live with.

When Jasmine was in her second year of primary school, her uncle died by suicide and left his guitar to her. Her dad picked up some chord books for her—Elvis, Oasis and Jimi Hendrix, especially. She began writing songs after that and, when she was seven or eight, she remembers, she wrote a “very emo song.” “It was called ‘Why?,’” Jasmine says. “And the chorus went, ‘Why did you fall from the bottom of Hell?’ It was pretty heavy.” Once, her dad came back from the library with a CD of Elliott Smith’s recently-released Basement on a Hill and copied that onto a CD-R for her and her siblings. “I made my dad go back and get the rest of the Elliott Smith catalog,” she laughs. “I always loved Either/Or and his self-titled. Weirdly, I used to do press-ups every night to ‘Speed Trials.’” And then she went through a phase with Iron & Wine’s work, entranced by finger-picking 1-5-6-4 chord progressions, which she claims she’s “never evolved from.” More recently, Jasmine’s dharma burns in the direction of Adrianne Lenker’s music. When she had long-COVID, she tabbed out the entirety of “music for indigo.”

While You Are the Morning is this rich, remarkable text of warm, folksy confessionals, walls of strings and sweeping, romantic, sun-baked resolution, Jasmine’s musical genealogy touches far more realms. Over a decade ago, she was playing in an Americana/garage rock band called Human Bones. And before that, she was in a punk group called the Gnarwhals, running around in the same circles as IDLES and Wet Leg. Years ago, Jasmine started a label, Breakfast Records, with some friends. She mentions that she still has the very first Breakfast Records t-shirt, gesturing towards the closet near her. “I remember it,” she explains, “because the transfer didn’t take.” By 2019, she’d dropped out from running the label but still released her first EP, Worn Through, with them.

During our interview, Yulia calls Jasmine from HMP Bronzefield, a prison on the Ashford outskirts in Surrey. After a “violent raid and arrest” in November, Yulia was taken into custody for allegedly “disrupting the Israeli genocide machine” and is being held on remand, without trial, for a year. Jasmine and Yulia’s chosen family have been making cross-country trips for visitation, bringing clothes and other possessions to her while also raising money to help her avoid eviction and establish a financial support-system once she’s no longer incarcerated (upon her arrest, she lost her job). “She told me that they didn’t let her have her Lana Del Rey CD, but they did let her have Toxicity by System of a Down.”

After coming out as trans to her then-spouse, Jasmine’s marriage ended quickly. She tried moving back in with her parents, but that wasn’t any better. While still in Bristol, she was homeless, until a friend, Han, offered Jasmine “her floor.” “You Are the Morning” was written about Han, who introduced Jasmine to Yulia. “I stayed on Yulia’s sofa for two weeks, and that was when I wrote a lot of the songs on the record,” she says of her arrival in Manchester. “She was coming on tour with us everywhere, and she was my roadie and she did merch. She made all of these friendship bracelets, and we’d sell them for Trans Mutual Aid Manchester, a really awesome organization that helps trans people in need here—especially trans people who are experiencing homelessness, which is something that obviously means a lot to me.”

Moving to Manchester from Bristol, and meeting Han and Yulia, was one of the pivotal and life-affirming decisions Jasmine has made. Upon getting to Manchester, she says, she fell in love with a trans person for the first time, but she wasn’t in a good place, struggling with PTSD and suicidal ideation. And with her divorce happening, it took a while for the relationship to begin. But it eventually did, and songs like “Skin on Skin,” “Elephant” and “Breaking in Reverse” were written about their love story. “I think being in this T4T situation was very healing for me,” Jasmine continues. She met some Manc dolls, many of them being musicians like her, and went to jam sessions with them. There, she met percussionist Eden O’Brien, who joined her at Sound City. At an Alex G show, Jasmine says, is where she met composer and bandmate Phoenix Rousiamanis. “We were the only two dolls there, in Manchester. She’s one of my closest friends now, and I feel very lucky to be associated with her. Finding this family here really made me feel able to be myself and start my transition.”

While the presence of boygenius on You Are the Morning made it to the top of press releases, Rousiamanis’ work as a virtuosic violinist and pianist colors just as much, if not more of the album. Her CV is impossibly good, including work as a Onassis Foundation fellow, a “Young Composer” in the London Philharmonic Orchestra and her trans opera, Songs of Descent, which is a take on the myth of Persephone going into the underworld, but through a trans lens (“It’s essentially an opera about dysphoria, and it’s fucking incredible”). She arranged the voices from the Trans Chorus of LA on “Elephant,” which happened on the last day of recording in Studio A at Sound City. “It’s this massive live room, and just filling that space with trans people felt like we were making history,” Jasmine says. “It was a really magical experience, it was really emotional for everyone involved.” She pauses, before recalling an especially intimate moment during the session. “I remember the choir started singing, and Phoenix was leading them, and me and the boys were in the control room. I looked around, and Lucy was welling up. It was a lot.” Rousiamanis also composed the very intentional and beautiful choral piece, “Transition,” that bridges “Elephant” and “Woman.”

The first jasmine.4.t show happened more than two years ago at a top surgery fundraiser in Manchester, for her friend Oliver, at Peer Hat, a pub that’s an iconic place of refuge for trans folk in the city (and the pub is even featured in the “Elephant” music video and served as the template for Jasmine’s website). “It was terrifying,” she admits, recalling the videos from that night—videos she’s since taken down from her social media, citing dysphoria. “Hearing how much my voice has changed and how much the songs have changed, I basically had the whole album back then. But, looking back, I met so many people that night that became my closest friends. Maybe I’ll put [the videos] back up one day.” Her set took place in Peer Hat’s basement space, where everyone sat on the floor and “shut the fuck up” when she started playing “Breaking in Reverse.” It was Jasmine’s first time doing live music in over two years; her first show as a trans woman was supposed to be as an opener for Dacus in Manchester, but, while still recovering from long-COVID, she caught COVID again.

Sound City, where You Are the Morning was recorded, holds a deep lineage. Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana made music there, and it’s where both boygenius releases and Bridgers’ Punisher came to life; you can feel the history in the rooms. It took 12 days to make the LP and, throughout the recording process, Jasmine and her band (Rousiamanis, O’Brien and Emily Abbott) were editing the songs. She says that Dacus, in particular, has a great mind for the process, that the title track, in its earliest iterations, was a lot longer until Dacus cut sections out. Sometimes that meant ditching verses, sometimes it meant axing just a single word from a line. Regardless, the vital parts of the material always remained intact, and the work grew more concise with every session. And, being in Los Angeles gave the album a different meaning. The movies usually get it right, that spending time in a place that is so mythologized and vast can change you, especially if you’re surrounded by people you love and people you trust. You Are the Morning, to borrow a phrase from Jasmine herself, sounds like a bunch of queer and trans women making history, in a place where history warrants many contexts.

“New Shoes,” which is featured on Worn Through, was written about Jasmine’s ex-spouse at the beginning of their relationship and had become a favorite of Dacus’ when she and Jasmine toured together, pre-transition. Singing it after the divorce was an act of reclamation, as Jasmine turned it into an ode to her new family. That power returns when the trans choir sings a line at the end of “Elephant” that goes, “Look at this, it’s all for you.” When Jasmine wrote it, the “this” was her outfits, makeup and nails and the “you” was her first trans love. But, once the power of the band and the choir both kick in, “this” became the density of expression and art and “you” became the listener, or a “trans woman just discovering her identity.” It’s that feeling of making something for the sake of hope.

You Are the Morning is a dramatic, prismatic and dynamic trans album, subtly and boldly capturing gestures of joy and solidarity after living with PTSD and seeing the other side of homelessness, hate crimes and global transphobia. These songs all say, “I see you, and here’s the proof.” And that oneness extends beyond the trans community, too—be it Jasmine’s siblings, or other queer people who’ve made steps towards dismantling machines of violence. “Now, looking back on the record, the most important message that I wanted to carry was don’t forget that this goes beyond your community. We need to be picking each other up and helping each other out in each other’s fights.” I think of Jasmine’s hair, dyed blue and pink, and the way it shouts in defiance. And I think of Jasmine and Bridgers trading verses on “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation,” only to come together and sing, “We can rewind and un-dent, reprocess and desensitize” as one voice. It’s divine, and celebratory, and I am in awe of all of it.

With a tour coming up, which includes her own headlining tour across Europe, US shows with Dacus and Katie Gavin, and a London gig opening for Los Campesinos!, Jasmine tells me she is overcoming her fear of violence. “I’ve experienced a few violent hate crimes on the streets, and they really fucked me up,” she admits. “And having to travel overseas, through airports where you’re horribly groped by security, I think it’s all just so terrifying.” It was easier when Yulia was with her, because she’s gotten between Jasmine and handsy, violent people too many times to count. “I’m really missing her on the road. It’s quite scary going into 2025 without her. That’s been the hardest thing, finding resilience to just keep going through that.”

After opening for boygenius in Gunnersbury more than a year ago, Jasmine wrote a song that went, “I don’t have long until it all changes.” “And I didn’t,” she concludes, “because my life is so different now.” If You Are the Morning is meant to become a signpost for any one truth, it’s that things can get better. Maybe an affirmation like that doesn’t mean much right now, as the protections and freedoms of trans people in the United States and United Kingdom are under attack, but the aches that galvanized these 13 songs—dysphoria, rejection, homelessness, post-traumatic stress and hormone replacement therapy—exist in the same sentence as joy, juxtapositions, flaws and all. The film accompanying “Woman” shows Jasmine taking her first dose of estrogen. This is a human album full of first loves, new gathering places, renewal and thanks both given and received. Of a body once “unacceptable and abandoned” but now so sweet it can hold the entire world. I need these songs, and maybe you need them, too. Because, to hear You Are the Morning is to surrender to a love without pretense—a love arranged not into the shape of resolve, but into the shape of time beautifully gained.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

jasmine.4.t: The Best of What’s Next