
jasmine.4.t
You Are the Morning
Saddest Factory
Jan 17, 2025 Web Exclusive
A nervous, giddy excitement brims through You Are the Morning, the debut album from trans singer/songwriter jasmine.4.t. Certainly, Jasmine has much to be excited about. For one, the UK artist is the first international signee to Phoebe Bridgers’ label, Saddest Factory, putting a thrilling spotlight on her music before her first album was even announced. However, the album’s excitement feels more intimate and personal. It is the electricity of skin meeting skin for the first time, the nervous rush of going against your better judgment and giving yourself over to new love, the healing warmth of being truly seen by those who love and support you. It is the excitement of the titular new morning.
You Are the Morning came together over a tumultuous period in Jasmine’s life, during which she was bed-bound with complications from long COVID and chronic fatigue and subsequently came out as trans. Her marriage fell apart, her family life fell into chaos, and she was left traumatized and couch-surfing in Manchester. She credits Manchester’s queer community with saving her life during this period. Amidst the greatest upheaval of her life, she wrote the songs that would later become You Are the Morning while planning to release the demos DIY. At a friend’s urging, Jasmine took a chance on calling up Lucy Dacus after touring with her pre-transition. Dacus played her music for Bridgers, who immediately called her manager, and Jasmine was quickly signed and flown out to Los Angeles to record the album.
While the album will undoubtedly draw listeners among boygenius fans—with Dacus, Bridgers, and Julien Baker all producing and appearing on the record—its intimacy puts an unyielding focus on Jasmine herself. Her heartrending vocals are often front and center, whether they are dancing above the homespun folk fingerpicking of “Kitchen” tangled in rock guitars on “Tall Girl,” or lilting through glassy piano tones on “New Shoes.” Jasmine’s voice and lyrics are the album’s cornerstone, rendering her songwriting with depth and utter sincerity as she tours through hushed folk confessionals, sweeping swells of strings, and impassioned, crashing indie rock.
With each track Jasmine offers momentary glimpses into her world, often taking small everyday moments and making them feel revelatory. The album opens in a vignette of domesticity and longing on “Kitchen,” and zooms even closer with the visceral seductive rush of the lead single, “Skin on Skin.” Many trans women describe going on HRT as a second puberty, with the new hormones heightening the rollercoaster of emotions that come as part of transitioning. Tracks such as “Breaking in Reverse” and “Elephant” capture this rush in swooning, romantic language, tracing furtive glances, longing tension, and moments of healing, lovestruck bliss. In Jasmine’s hands, each emotion feels vivid and larger than life, blown up to the scale of a tear-jerking cinematic drama.
As the record unfolds, it steadily takes shape as an album-length paean to queer friendship and t4t love, a love letter to the community that saved Jasmine at her lowest. Jasmine is often at her most warm and tender when she is writing directly to her loved ones, as with the acoustic sun-dappled shine of the title track. Here, Jasmine’s vocals come ensconced in subtle body percussion, violin accents, and fingerpicked guitar, as her lyrics place love and community at the center of her world: “You are the morning you make the grass grow / You are the hawthorn tangled in dog-rose / The open window with the curtains closed / Hearing your pulse between your breaths hearing the trees when the wind blows.”
Similarly, “Best Friend’s House” and “Highfield” offer heartwarming tributes to the people who put Jasmine up when she first arrived in Manchester. The former track brings out the members of boygenius alongside Jasmine’s bandmates, Claud, E.R. Fightmaster, and Becca Mancari for a plaintive campfire singalong, with Jasmine retreating into her friendships as a bulwark against the noise and viciousness of the world outside. Although the album’s emotional center lies in Jasmine and her lyrics, the record’s sound is steeped in contributions from her collaborators. Aside from “Kitchen,” Jasmine’s band—all of whom are trans women—features on every track, with Phoenix Rousiamanis on piano and strings, Eden O’Brien on drums, and Emily Abbott on bass. All the members of boygenius also play supporting roles, providing backing vocals throughout the album in addition to Julien Baker’s searing guitar work on “Skin on Skin.”
While subtle folk and chamber pop arrangements color most of the album, the quiet moments belie a wild chemistry at play when Jasmine and her band fully let loose. One of the album’s highlights comes in “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation,” a twangy indie rocker about dissociating in the grocery aisle complete with sawing fiddle and a barnstorming climax. Meanwhile, “Elephant” chugs forward at a resolute pace, growing ever more intense until it flames out in a dazzling storm of guitar theatrics and leaves only angelic choral vocals in its wake. Sometimes you can imagine how the alternate DIY demo versions of these songs may have unfolded, but the band and production leave an indelible mark, bolstering Jasmine’s confessional songwriting to vital new heights.
In its lowest moments, You Are the Morning navigates experiences that are likely familiar for many trans women— dissociation, dysphoria, rejection, trauma. The album also arrives at the onset of a new year that will see trans people’s legal protections, access to medical care, and very existence under threat in both the UK and in the U.S. Yet, the album never fully feels downcast. Instead of pain, it centers joy as an integral part of transness, a joy born out of the thrill of new firsts, new love, and new community. Jasmine’s very being is a testament to the optimism at the record’s core, the promise of a new day of discovery and renewal. This plays out in touching detail on the vocoder-tinged piano ballad, “Roan.” At one point Jasmine calls her body “unacceptable and abandoned.” Yet, in concert with another trans woman, this woundedness blossoms into something raw, celestial, and hopeful: “You were showing me / Divinity / What we are / In camaraderie / A world within / The sweetness of your skin.” (www.jasmine4t.com)
Author rating: 8.5/10
Average reader rating: 6/10
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