jasmine.4.t’s You Are The Morning Is a Dazzling Debut – Album Review

jasmine.4.t

You Are The Morning (Saddest Factory Records)

In the ever-shifting world of alt-pop, few debuts land with the kind of emotional clarity and quiet force as You Are The Morning. It’s the first full-length from Manchester artist jasmine.4.t, the project of trans singer-songwriter Jasmine Cruickshank, and the first U.K. signing to Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records. Drawing deeply from her own lived experience, the album feels less like a product and more like a shared moment—tender, raw, and wrapped in the warmth of chosen family. It’s the kind of record that doesn’t shout to be heard—it just breathes, and suddenly you’re holding your breath with it.

Cruickshank has spoken candidly about the album’s origins—written during a time of intense instability as she navigated the early stages of her transition while couch-surfing through Manchester’s queer community. That longing for grounding, for connection, is everywhere here. But it’s never played for pity. Instead, her songs shimmer with the emotional push-and-pull of someone trying to hold onto joy in the middle of chaos.

Take ‘Elephant’, for example. It starts quiet, almost shy—soft guitars, a pulsing beat, vocals that feel like they’re being whispered directly to you. But then it builds, gradually and beautifully, until everything spills over. It’s a song about yearning, about trying to stay friends with someone you’re still in love with, and you can feel the ache in every line. The video, which shows Cruickshank wandering through the rain, adds another layer of intimacy—grey city streets mirroring the kind of heartache that lingers quietly in the background.

What’s most powerful about You Are The Morning is how Cruickshank resists the urge to compartmentalise. Her experiences as a trans woman—moments of joy, collapse, pain, and recovery—aren’t laid out in tidy themes or boxed into narratives. They’re messy, real, and deeply human, stretching across eleven tracks that favour emotional honesty over slick presentation. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the brilliantly titled ‘Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation’, a song that captures a harrowing moment of trauma with startling clarity, only to pivot toward something quietly hopeful by the second verse. It’s a testament to her ability to hold space for both devastation and gratitude in the same breath—a lyrical perspective that threads through the whole record.

And while the subject matter can be heavy, the music itself rarely feels weighed down. Tracks like ‘Backseat’ and ‘Soft Landing’ lean into ambient textures and glowing synth lines, with subtle production touches from Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker adding depth without ever overshadowing Cruickshank’s voice. There’s a sense of spaciousness throughout, a kind of careful restraint that lets each lyric hit with full emotional weight.

One of the most affecting elements of the record is its deep sense of community. The album was recorded at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, with co-production from the boygenius trio—Phoebe, Lucy, and Julien—and a rotating cast of trans musicians from both Manchester and the U.S. You can hear the love and care in every track, especially on songs like ‘Give It Time’ and the title track ‘You Are The Morning’, where the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles lifts everything into something communal and cathartic. This isn’t just Cruickshank telling her story—it’s a shared testimony, built with and for others like her.

You Are The Morning is a devastatingly beautiful debut that balances heartbreak with hope. It's a record that asks hard questions about identity, belonging, and the cost of creating art from pain, but it also offers answers in the form of love, community, and self-acceptance. Cruickshank isn’t just documenting a chapter of her life—she’s writing a kind of roadmap for what it means to come undone and rebuild, not in secret, but in the open, surrounded by people who see you clearly.

This is not a debut made for the algorithms or the charts. It’s something far more lasting: an invitation to feel deeply, to listen closely, and maybe to heal a little, too.