is feeling every feeling that exists. “Depends on the day,” she tells CLASH candidly on the eve of the release of her new record. ‘’ has been mine and my best friend’s shared favourite album since she first recommended it to me aged 19, so I’m feeling a little overwhelmed too as we hop onto Zoom. Luckily, Julia loves glue guns, Britney Spears, crafting, old movies and iPod walks without her phone, so we find common ground pretty quickly.
Her new album ‘’ is a reintroduction of sorts, and not just because it’s Jacklin’s first release with her new home 4AD. The warmth and intimacy that coursed through ‘Crushing’ remains, but her approach to writing and recording has changed a little, this time enhanced by familiar friends and surroundings. Shaking off the pressures to “level up” with each new album, she opted to record in the cosy upstairs of her old local in Melbourne, a cluster of hotel rooms converted into a recording studio by an old friend. The pub influenced her songwriting in some tangible ways, even lending its name to the record, but also in ways that Julia admits she “probably can’t even recognise and maybe never will.”
“I’ve never made a record at home, or in the place that I live,” she notes, “Usually my music life and my home life feel very separate, which can be a bit confusing. I come home and I don’t feel like I can relate to people. For ‘The Gem’, I was at home. I’m working and everybody else is working – we’re all just living our lives. There was something in that that helped me make a record in a pretty strange time of my life.”
To mediate that strangeness further, Julia shared her space with close friends rather than unfamiliar collaborators. Four albums in, ‘The Gem’ marks the first time she’s worked with a producer she had a relationship with prior to recording, which gifted her a new sense of freedom. “I thought that was what you were supposed to do,” she admits, “But everybody I’ve worked with on this record, I’ve experienced life with. It was a really wonderful experience to be with people who love me and like me.”
“Making a record requires you to be weird,” Julia adds. “It requires you to be okay with being strange. Making a record, to me, it doesn’t make sense. But because everybody knew me, I felt like I could be a bit of a cliched artist. A bit wacky, weird. I even said at the beginning of the process, ‘When we finish playing or listening back to a song, do not look at me and do not ask me what I think. I’m not gonna know.’ I wouldn’t have had the courage to say that to people in the past.”
Perhaps most integral to the excavation of ‘The Gem’ was producer Robert Muinos, who Julia describes as a classic “fuck the system” kind of guy. “He was constantly like ‘Who cares? Literally who gives a fuck?’ That’s Rob in a nutshell,” she jokes. It was this nonchalance that allowed these songs to eventually surface above ground, as well as what Julia asserts as her greatest healer – time.
“When I started, I wasn’t being honest that I wasn’t quite ready to make a record,” she shares. “I was too in my head. I’d just finished a whole year of touring so I was very much in rockstar mode. I was still in my, ‘Oh I’m Julia Jacklin, the sad singer-songwriter.’ I needed more time to just live my regular life, or even just to to live a regular life without being on a literal pedestal every evening.”
Stepping off-stage and into ‘The Gem’, away from rockstardom and back into real life, was essential in readying Julia to make music again. “The music industry can be very self-conscious,” she acknowledges, “very scared of its own shadow. We’re all looking at each other and our own faces the whole time. We’re all scared whilst our job is to project confidence and self-expression. The whole way it’s set up makes us all kind of hate ourselves.”
Spending some time away from that world, a little closer to ground, did mean that The Gem took slightly longer to polish. It arrives just over four years on from 2022’s ‘’, which dove into moviegoing loneliness, religious schooling, and loving so hard you just might achieve immortality, but Julia maintains that this is not a comeback. “You take more than three years to release an album and everyone calls it a comeback. It’s not a comeback, I’m just releasing an album!” she exclaims. “It just takes that long.”
‘The Gem’ wanders back into some well-charted territory in Julia’s catalogue. It considers the sticky coexistence of love and freedom and turns mundanities into something bigger, yearning for connection in tiny gestures like passing salt across the table. “Those are the kind of lines that made people listen to my music at the beginning. I always want to ground things in an action we all do.” The collection reflects on past relationships and checks in with former selves, asking “Why did you allow yourself to be treated like that?” with newfound tenderness. But time has also graced Julia with new lyrical preoccupations.
Perhaps more than anything else, ‘The Gem’ considers our capacity for change, or, rather, our lack thereof. Opener ‘Brand New’ is a tongue-in-cheek nod to this theme and an extension of an ongoing bit in Jacklin’s life. “I’m always saying to people, ‘Oh tomorrow, I’m gonna be so different,’” she jokes. “‘I’m gonna be Julia 2.0. I’m really gonna be in control of this thing. I like to pretend I have the ability to change more than I do. But I know now that one of the most beautiful things about life, and one of its great tragedies, is that we really are who we are and there’s only so much we can change about ourselves.”
“This record is me fully understanding that. I found a lot of relief in it, and also a lot of grief, because that also means the people around me are who they are. We can’t expect people to change as much as I thought they would. It’s something you only learn from living a longer life. You will not know that in your twenties, because you just haven’t been on earth for long enough to see people live alongside you for that length of time.”
With enough time on earth, you’ll lose a little interest in yourself too. ‘The Gem’, true to its shimmering name, is reflective, but it softens the hyper-realist, diaristic tone that has marked Julia’s writing in the past; detailing her innermost thoughts, conversations and memories with abandon. “I remembered early days, when you took my camera, turned to me, twenty-three, naked on your bed looking straight at you,” she sings on ‘Body’, the opener to her sophomore offering. Nowadays, she’s a little more reserved, or at least a little less specific.
On ‘The Gem’, she doles out home truths aplenty, often in their plainest terms. “The hardest thing to do is believe it when you say I love you,” she laments on the record’s third single, while ‘You Turned On The Tap’ distils grief into the line, “Nothing can prepare you for losing someone dear to your heart, don’t get caught up trying.” The album is no less affecting for this quality. In fact, it might even be more so. “I find that sometimes that hyper-specificity that I came up around, it can actually come off as less vulnerable,” Julia muses. “When I was more self-conscious, I’d be more inclined to be candid because I want to be understood by those around me.”
“In the past, I found myself very fascinating. I thought if I kept thinking about myself, I was gonna actually find some answers. I understand now that I’m just never gonna fully understand myself and, actually, by trying to, I wasn’t on the trajectory to have a very happy life. I’m not as worried about being misunderstood anymore by those around me.”
‘The Gem’ may contain her most confident and mature songwriting yet but, in a live setting, the songs are still infants to Julia and her bandmates. A UK record store tour was cut short earlier in the summer due to illness, so the new music is still waiting on a proper live debut. “They’re not ready,” declares Julia. “I’m going away with my band to rehearse for the first time properly. Every time I’ve had to play a new song recently, I kind of hate it.”
“It’s so crazy to play a new song and then play ‘Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You’, which is kind of a part of me,” she explains. “My hands will go to the place that they need to go, and I don’t need to look. The song comes out of my mouth and I might not even be there. My brain can be somewhere else, but my body just knows what to do. It’s very jarring to play something like that, that feels literally like part of my DNA, up against a song that feels like it’s still a toddler, just stumbling around. It pulls me in and out of the experience. I just need to raise the new songs to at least teenagers before the tour starts.”
When ‘The Gem’ does come of age, it’s sure to become a precious part of Jacklin’s setlist and discography. Tackling grief, growth, phone calls with your dad, and the realisation that you have to be your own God sometimes, she bolsters her themes with breezy pub recordings and sonic odes to the city that made her. She’s not quite brand new, but this is Julia at her most wise and wistful.
‘The Gem’ is out now.