On her new album, Delusion, Tempers – the musical alias of New York–based artist Jasmine Golestaneh – embarks on a non-linear exploration of healing and becoming. Across ten tracks, she navigates a fever dream of storm clouds and sunburst, examining delusion as a series of survival strategies shaped by desire, distraction, and cultural pressure.Drawing on poetic lyricism and broad, synth-driven musical palettes, Tempers weaves a rich web of storytelling that is as cinematic as it is elemental. The album moves fluidly across genres, from synth pop to techno, grunge to metal cues, with strings and balladic moments seeded throughout. The track sequencing shifts between unpredictable narrative journeys and discordant emotional states, symbolizing recursive behavioral patterns, emotional flux, and the disorienting process of awakening.
Co-produced by Golestaneh and Jorge Elbrecht, Delusion opens with the ominous yet transcendent opening track “Sublevel,” where self-mythology feels momentarily limitless, before dissolving into the soft, destabilized intimacy of “Rise and Fall Fetish.” That tension between elevation and collapse sets the tone for the record. For every moment of emotional vertigo, there are gestures of defiance and control – though they arrive with ambiguity and resist catharsis. On the track “Who Says,” that instability remains just beneath the surface, the song holding emotional autonomy and longing in unresolved coexistence. The music video translates this theme into the image of a hybrid creature, a fallen garbage mermaid, evading rescue. Rather than presenting delusion as a single rupture from reality, Delusion maps it as a process: something learned, relied upon, and difficult to release, even when it no longer serves.
“I’m exploring the line between self-invention and self-erasure,” Tempers says. “The album’s lyrical voice cycles through dreamlike scenarios, memory distortions, and emotional breakage – like someone caught between fantasy, agency, and affective collapse. It’s also a state shaped by living in a society where hope, distraction, and deception are constantly woven into each other.”
A multidisciplinary artist, Jasmine Golestaneh’s hand can also be felt in the Delusion album artwork, which features her own original collage connecting to the album’s themes. The image is inspired by the concept of a ‘black swan event’, the name given to a highly unpredictable occurrence that is only rationalised afterwards. The swan and the person are brought together unexpectedly in the image, just as different strands of perception come to a head on the record, the mysterious human figure – perhaps rising, perhaps falling.
Furthermore, Tempers has extended invitations to artistic collaborators around the new release. Writer Estelle Hoy has reinterpreted songs from Delusion in her own words as part of a “Remixed” lyric book, while multidisciplinary artist and musician Sandra Mujinga contributes a remix of “Rise and Fall Fetish”. The release of “Sublevel” coincided with the launch of capsule collection of 20 bespoke T-shirts created with visual artist Camille Henrot
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