YEARN’s 'Shapeshifter' is a bleeding-edge portrait of becoming

There are albums that document a story, and then there are albums that feel like the story itself. 'Shapeshifter', the first full-length from Seattle’s YEARN (project of Lily Minke Tahar), is the latter: a vivid musical moulting, equal parts séance and self-excavation.

Crafted from the ground up with modest gear and maximal honesty, the record murmurs, warps, and glows, as if stitched from half-remembered dreams and emotional aftershocks. Every detail feels deliberate in its imperfection: the tape hiss, the warped strings, and the ambient interludes like rooms you used to live in but forgot how to enter.

The opener shimmers like a warning and a welcome, while the title-track smoulders with unstable percussion and harmonies that hover just out of reach. 'Midnight Mine' walks a tightrope between broken-night confession and celestial jazz-fusion séance, while 'dtl' flickers through genre like a signal from another timeline.

But 'Shapeshifter' isn’t about arriving at a destination. It’s about staying in the blur; honing the moment before identity settles. Tahar’s voice, often layered and frayed, sits in vulnerability, breathing through every knot.

For anyone who’s ever felt like a ghost in their own body or a stranger in familiar places, 'Shapeshifter' is a mirror held up to the liminal. It’s raw, spectral, and brave as hell. And in its refusal to resolve, it becomes a kind of salvation.