hen Sarah Julia arrived in Woodstock to record their debut album ‘The Fear That This Is Real’, they drove past a red maple tree. “It’s like it was bleeding,” Julia Nauta, one half of the sibling folk duo, says, recalling the crimson leaves burning bright against a fading autumnal backdrop. On their final day upstate, only a week later, they passed the tree again, only to find its branches bare. “It felt very symbolic”, she adds, as if somehow its fleeting, final burst of beauty had been the physical embodiment of all the things they had left behind on tape.

It’s a year later when they speak to , and the seasons are once again in transition. The album is out now, and the sisters are back home in Amsterdam, having just touched down from a US tour with former artist Mon Rovîa. These days, they’re often on the road, and in the past couple of years have opened for Paris Paloma, Faye Webster and even Neil Young. But before they became regulars on festival stages and in support slots for music greats, it was in the theatre that they first crept into the spotlight.

They grew up in Rotterdam, in a home soundtracked by Cat Stevens and Jim Croce. Sarah was born first – three years ahead of Julia – and is every bit the typical big sister: calm and reserved beside Julia’s self-described “chaos”. Naturally, she was the first to take to the stage, with Julia initially watching in awe from the front row before eventually daring to take the leap herself. As teenagers, they performed in musicals, TV shows and movies in the Netherlands before entering a TV songwriting contest where they came in third place. For a while after that, they wrote music individually, before upheaval in their family unit led them to start writing together again.