Album Review: jasmine.4.t, "You Are the Morning"
The Manchester-based indie songstress stuns on her kaleidoscopic and confessional debut album.
There is an intimacy to the music of jasmine.4.t that makes listening to her output feel almost perverse; her inner-most thoughts splayed out in front of us in the form of gentle, tender guitar strums and a fragile, emotional vocal delivery. This is part of the grand tradition of all great folk music, sacrificing small slivers of your privacy to connect with likeminded folx in search of community and a voice to speak life to the innermost thoughts they’re most scared to share themselves. Her 2019 EP, Worn Through, made it clear that she was a well-studied student of the craft, boasting highlights like the gut-wrenchingly beautiful closing track, “In the Autumn Evening Swoon.” She was able to tour that record alongside Lucy Dacus in a supporting slot on the Historian tour. It was on that tour that Jasmine would form a deep friendship with Lucy, who would go on to share her music with boygenius bandmate Phoebe Bridgers. And the rest, as they say, is history.
In the Summer of 2024, it was announced that jasmine.4.t would be the first UK-based signee to Phoebe Bridgers’ record label, Saddest Factory (MUNA, Charlie Hickey) to release her debut album, You Are the Morning, produced in partnership with the members of boygenius. The announcement also saw the release of “Skin on Skin”, a stunning debut single that features an absolute shredder of a guitar solo from Julien Baker. The track served as jasmine.4.t’s introduction to a wider audience, and from an outside perspective, it makes sense that would be song they chose for that task. It highlights all of the aforementioned features of her music – starting off with that gentle strum and features Jasmine’s fragile vocal as the focal point of the track. Two more singles (“Elephant” and “You Are the Morning”) would be released in preparation for the album’s January release, both of which showed off the range of what we should expect from the album.
“Elephant” has a thumping drum beat and immediacy to the song’s melody, hooking to your ear with careful restraint as she sings “Look at this/It’s all for you/We’ll sit different sides/Smile across the room.” You can feel the desperation in her voice as she yearns for a deeper connection with this other person, and when the song reaches its explosive climax around the three-minute mark, you can feel yourself start to cave into the emotion that she’s experiencing. The whaling of the guitars, the break of her voice. She makes it feel like the walls are collapsing around you, exposing the house for the foundation. And “You Are the Morning” exists on the complete opposite end of this spectrum. This is one of her most gentle songs, with gentle strums and slides across the fretboard of her guitar and the gentle swell of strings underpinning Jasmine telling us a love story. A love story for another person, but also a love story for herself.
The warm dayglow of love is present throughout the record, both romantic and platonic. The nervousness of the talking stage has never sounded as romantic as it does on standout track “Breaking in Reverse.” There’s an alt-country twang to the music of this track, with stomping drums and careful slides. Open notes and stacked vocals illuminate a chorus of “I know exactly what I’m doing/Cause it’s exactly what you’re doing to me/And I told you I’m writing again/And you know exactly what it’s about/Two hearts, breaking in reverse.” You can feel her starting to fall in love, confessional style lyrics bringing all the confusion of this feeling to the forefront. Butterflies are replaced by goosebumps, as the song comes to and as Jasmine sings, “And I told you I’m writing again/And you know exactly what it’s about/Two souls, aching/Two lips, shaking/Two eyes, waking/the time it’s taking/it’s painstaking/two hearts, breaking, in reverse” and the track erupts into something that can only be described as the perfect soundtrack to a line dance at Stud Country.
Platonic love sounds cinematic on “Best Friend’s House,” a triumphant and too-short celebration of the safety of community. There are moments where you don’t want to be with your biological family, but you don’t want to be alone either. There is a comfort that comes from friendship that you just can’t find anywhere else – not from yourself, not from your parents, not (always) from your partner. A best friend is someone that loves you and chooses to keep loving you but in a way that feels completely pure and childlike. Someone that you can cry about romantic pitfalls to but laugh about how ugly you look when you cry at the same time. It’s an all too short (clocking in at just under 90 seconds) celebration of that, that features a gentle buzz as Jasmine sings, “I just wanna be/In my best friend’s house/In my best friend’s bed/with the curtains closed/and nothing in my head/There, I am safe/Even if they are away/Even if they aren’t awake.”
The midpoint of the album is rabble rouser, “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation”, that sees Jasmine trading vocals with Phoebe Bridgers as the two harmonize over a state of dissociation in a grocery store – something that Phoebe seems to frequent if this and her verse on Muna’s “Silk Chiffon” are to be seen as evidence of a trend. This is another song that leans into the alt-country approach that was present on “Breaking in Reverse”, but whereas that song felt sort of like it could’ve been a Martina McBride staple, this one has all the self-aware sass of something that would come from The Chicks. Nothing quite captures the mundanity and detachment of something as banal as grocery shopping as well as Phoebe and Jasmine singing “But now it’s not me there, it’s someone wearing my hair/telling you I’m okay and I’ll be back soon/But I’m not even anywhere, it’s so fucking unfair/They’ve done this, and they still sleep in our room” before we hear Jasmine trading in her soft, signature croon for a full bodied shout of “There’s nothing in my head but the screaming/Got nothing left to dread but my leaving/The tub fills with my blood, hits the ceiling/I won’t act, but it’s all that I’m dreaming.”
The community that she’s found with Lucy Dacus is most evident in the gentleness of the song “New Shoes.” The track calls back to “Shoes” off of Worn Through, borrowing the lyrics, “You is you/I is I/and the interface is stable/ You is you/I is I/and the interface is interf-” before we get Jasmine erupting into the closing sentiment of “Let’s make a family/with family priorities/I need new shoes/These are worn through” in harmony with Lucy. Tender, in the room sounds of sniffles, tears, and light laughter bring an already perfect song to life; breathing a warmth into this track that will fill the wells of your tear ducts to the brink of collapse. I can’t think of a more perfect way to pay homage to the version of Jasmine that wrote the songs on her previous EP while also celebrating the person that she is now.
How fitting it is that the album is called You Are the Morning. The songwriting hits like sunrise through a bedroom window — warm and kaleidoscopic, calm and exciting, a beautiful reminder that life is worth living when you remember to slow down and appreciate what you have.
You Are the Morning is out now on Saddest Factory Records. Don’t forget to stream/buy the album. Links for that can be found here.