Jhemma - Burn the Tapes [Gray & Blue Marble]

Burn the Tapes is Jhemma's debut album, ten songs written after a career spent acting for other people's cameras finally turned into music made entirely on her own terms.

Jhemma built a working actor's résumé before this record, roles on Westworld, Doom Patrol, and Bones among the credits, her career kicked off by Ugly Betty after moving from Miami to Los Angeles to chase it. Musical theatre was always underneath that path, and the pandemic gave her the stillness to actually listen to it again, discovering that the quietest voice in her own head turned out to be the one that most needed singing rather than acting out. The album that resulted is genuinely cinematic, unsurprising given how much of her creative life has happened on screen rather than on a stage or in a studio.

Saturn Return names its subject directly, that astrological rite of passage rendered as a genuine reckoning rather than a horoscope reference. Falling in Love with My Shadow carries the record's clearest psychological honesty, self-examination as the actual subject rather than metaphor. Walking Through the Flames pushes toward catharsis, and Letting Go closes the album exactly where a debut built on processing the past should land, release rather than resolution.

A first album from someone who spent years inhabiting other people's stories before finally trusting her own.