IAN SWEET’s debut full-length Shapeshifter is now available for streaming, in advance of it’s release. You can stream all ten tracks from The album will be available on September 6th via Hardly Art, and will be out on CD, cassette, and digital formats Friday, September 9th.

Ian Sweet, start their tour in support of Shapeshifter on September 6th with a show at the Middle East Upstairs, and celebrates their record release on Friday, September 9th with a Shea Stadium show in Brooklyn featuring Florist, Horse Jumper of Love, and Hovvdy.

IAN SWEET
Shapeshifter
September 9, 2016

01. Pink Marker
02. Slime Time Live
03. #23
04. 2soft2chew
05. Cactus Couch
06. Shapeshifter
07. All Skaters Go To Heaven
08. Knife Knowing You
09. Quietly Streaming
10. Pink Marker 2

Tour Dates:

09.06.16 – Cambridge, MA – Middle East Upstairs #
09.07.16 – Philadelphia, PA – Boot & Saddle # &
09.08.16 – Baltimore, MD – Metro Gallery $
09.09.16 – Brooklyn, NY – Album Release Show at Shea Stadium # % ^
09.10.16 – Lancaster, PA – Lizard Lounge $
09.11.16 – Pittsburgh, PA – Black Forge #
09.13.16 – Toronto, ON – Drake Hotel #
09.14.16 – Montreal, QC – Brasserie Beaubien ^ +
09.21.16 – New Haven, CT – Bar

$ – w/ Diet Cig
# – w/ Horse Jumper of Love
& – w/ Harmony Tividad (Girlpool)
% – w/ Florist
^ – w/ HOVVDY
+ – all-ages

AN SWEET started in 2014 with a string of text messages. Medford was a few days away from embarking on her first tour when the driver and drummer she recruited cancelled. Medford sent IAN SWEET drummer Tim Cheney — whom she barely knew — a series of desperate messages, asking if he knew how to drum and whether or not he would be willing to take two weeks off of life to go on tour. Cheney responded soon after with a simple: “Yes.”

Medford and Cheney’s friendship evolved from their time spent on the road into something that she describes as intuitive, telepathic. At the time, Medford had been performing solo under the moniker IAN — in honor of the nickname her skater friends gave her in high school — and put out a self-recorded EP titled Have You Ever Loved Anything This Much. That year, she and Cheney enlisted bassist Damien Scalise, and IAN SWEET became a trio. Medford describes Cheney and Scalise as polar opposites that compliment one another; two charged forces that she mediates, forming a platonic balance that brought Medford stability at a time when she didn’t have any.

While she was writing Shapeshifter, Medford’s life was in turmoil. She ended an emotionally abusive relationship in Boston, graduated from Berklee College of Music, and briefly moved home to the San Fernando Valley, thinking she would stay there. Medford was unsure of the band’s future and suffering from a severe, undiagnosed panic disorder. When she returned to Boston to record the album in July of 2015 alongside Cheney and Scalise, Medford was reminded of everything she’d hoped to escape after graduation. She felt stagnant; trudging through a quicksand made up of heartbreak and severe depression, a process she references on Shapeshifter stand-out “Slime Time Live”…