Making her first appearance in the LA music scene, Ventura County-native Jasmine Sankaran’s “Snakebite” gathers its lilting petals of jangly guitars and achingly delivered melancholia into something so lovingly sad. Sharp and witty, the Berkeley graduate made her first step towards music after she graduated with a degree in Creative Writing but realized she’d written more songs than short stories. Sankaran’s poetically peppered lyricisms and their fluctuation from deadpan mutterings to pained cries have immediately given her a niche–fans of Jay Som, Hazel English, and Japanese Breakfast will delight in adding her to their more melodically inclined lo-fi playlists. But far from pigeon-holing an artist with only one song out, Sankaran has a familiarity to her and an innate knack for breeding intimacy not only in the bedroom-demo sound of her song but also in her lyrics. Of the song, she describes it as a combination “the mysticism of my Vietnamese-Indian culture with the heartbreak and reality of growing up.” Decidedly personal images end up becoming oddly universal experiences, on the opening lines she sings “There’s a chemistry set that is built in my head / It’s so unstable you smash the glass across the table.”

“My brother actually came up with the chords to ‘Snakebite.’ He was messing around on piano one night while we were on break from college – he’s a classical pianist – and he came up with this group of chords that sounded interesting,” Sankaran says of the creation of the song. “Before he shut his piano I asked him what those chords were, wrote them down, and later turned them into ‘Snakebite.’”

Listen to Jasmine Sankaran’s debut single “Snakebite” below, out September 9 via PLAG Records.

Visit her Facebook to stay updated on future releases and show announcements.