Last February, after Coldplay performed an emotional, choir-backed “Fix You” on SNL, Chris Martin ran into his biggest fan. “I kind of forced him to meet me,” Jilian Medford recalls with a laugh. “He had just come off the stage and I was like, ‘Hi! I love you so much. I’m so sorry, can we take a photo?’ And he was like, ‘I have to go pray.’ But I was just begging him.”
Martin, who did reluctantly take a photo, had no idea he was talking to Ian Sweet, one of the most thrilling and experimental voices in indie rock. Under this name, the 30-year-old Medford has released three albums, and her fourth, the incredible Sucker, is out Nov. 3 via Polyvinyl. If her recent cover of “Yellow” wasn’t telling enough, Medford continues to draw inspiration from Coldplay on Sucker, an album whose version of indie pop is often unabashedly anthemic. “That’s my MO,” she says, smiling. “I think it’s ’cause I love Coldplay.”
But Medford also dips her feet into other sounds on Sucker, from art rock to dreamy shoegaze, making it difficult to reduce her to a single genre. “Sometimes that confuses listeners, or it’s almost like people malfunction,” she says. “Being like, ‘Where should I put this? Where should this land?’… I keep wanting to explore every genre, and I just want to make music that I’m excited about. I want to feel like I can listen to my own songs.” (She takes a pause and begins to laugh: “I don’t.”)
Medford is sitting at an outdoor table at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, wearing denim overalls, a white blouse, and a 2000s-era stainless-steel ball-chain necklace. She moved from the Lower East Side to near Prospect Park a couple weeks ago, a much-needed change for her and her Jack Russell-Chihuahua, Blueberry.
“I was living a funny Sex and the City fantasy in my little studio, but it was unbearably loud,” she says of her old Ludlow Street apartment, directly across from Katz’s Deli. Now in Brooklyn, she spends her mornings blissfully drinking coffee and playing fetch with her dog at the park. “I’m a crazy homebody now,” she says. “Nobody’s ever going to see me, ‘cause I love my place so much.”
This feeling of contentment extends to the making of Sucker, which Medford wrote and recorded at the Outlier Inn, a studio located on a farm in upstate New York. She made two trips there, the first being in October 2022, when she and her mom drove cross-country from her hometown of Los Angeles. They stopped at multiple national parks along the way, listening to hours and hours of Howard Stern.
“My mom is an angel,” she says. “Then [she] and my sister went to Hawaii together, and I said, ‘Why wasn’t I invited?’ My mom was like, ‘We did the road trip.’ And I was like, ‘That’s not the same! At all!’”
Medford hadn’t written any new songs, but she had just ended a relationship and desperately wanted to leave the West Coast. “I was really itching to leave L.A.,” she says. “I just knew I wanted to see what I could do, isolated from everyone and everything, and be with unfamiliar gear in a weird place.”
Medford got her wish, spending two weeks on 12 acres of land, all by herself except for the owner’s yellow lab, who would often doze on the porch. “Suddenly, I had an infinite amount of ideas,” she says. “Smoking Again,” one of the record’s highlights, is a power-pop gem with stormy synths that carry Medford’s dainty vocals. Medford wrote it quickly after she noticed she was smoking and drinking a lot of wine, which helped her lean into her creativity.
“Although I was being unhealthy with my habits, I [felt] like these things are helping with the process,” she says. “‘Smoking Again’ is an anthem about self-destruction, but not being mad at yourself about it and understanding that we all do it. I think there’s clarity through that. This record as a whole is recognizing my behavior and taking accountability, and also a lot of self-acceptance for the first time, kind of ever.”
It’s a far cry from Show Me How You Disappear, Medford’s 2021 album that she wrote while she was in an outpatient therapy program for anxiety. Tracks like “Drink the Lake” and “Get Better” offered an intense look into Medford’s mind at the time, but their swirling sounds also provided comfort — not only to Medford, but to many listeners in the pandemic.
By the end of the album’s press cycle, Medford found herself exhausted from discussing her mental health struggles. “So many people grasped onto the story behind Disappear, like, ‘Oh my God, you were an intensive outpatient, and how was that?!’” she says. “People want to hear what you’re going through, but it was clickbait-y. And then I get pigeonholed into being the mental health advocate girlie. I believe that everyone should be checking in with themselves, but I’m not out here screaming from the rooftops.”
Still, she looks back on that period with immense gratitude. “That record saved a part of me,” she says. “If I didn’t make it, I don’t know where I’d be. It was like sifting through the weeds, grasping onto things, like, ‘I hope this lyric will help me literally to survive.’ But the very, very intense emotions that were on Disappear aren’t as present on this one. It’s a lot more confident and secure in where I’m at in my life, and feeling for the first time ever that I’ve reclaimed a lot of power and strength. That’s growth for me, and I’m really proud.”
As Medford notes, Sucker isn’t all “sunshine and rainbows.” “Emergency Contact,” her personal favorite on the record, documents her pandemic breakup. Medford says that although she initiated the split, she regretted it afterwards, experiencing a delayed sense of sadness. “The light is out in my kitchen/But I’m still washing the dishes,” she sings over twinkling instrumentation.
Then there are lighter moments, like the title track and the finale “Hard,” which she wrote about falling in love with her boyfriend Martin Herlihy. Medford met Herlihy, an SNL writer and member of the sketch comedy trio Please Don’t Destroy, through cast member Sarah Sherman. The two SNL comedians star in her video for “Your Spit,” the lead single for Sucker. It’s a song about making out, and the poppiest moment on the album by far.
“I was just thinking about this genre of indie rock, whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean, [and how] people really want you to have had something traumatic to share,” she says. “I started feeling that it was OK to have fun with it.”
Sitting in the peaceful Botanic Garden, with the crisp fall afternoon sunlight hitting her brown hair, she begins to smile. “It’s OK to not be the darkest, saddest girl in the room.”
