Julia Jacklin
Julia Jacklin has never sounded more certain of uncertainty. As she returns with fourth album ‘The Gem’, the Australian songwriter talks fame, freedom, and why she’s finally stopped trying to be special.
Words: Lisa Wright. Photos: Eva Pentel.
As Julia Jacklin was excavating the world of her fourth album ‘The Gem’, chipping away over the space of a year (the lengthiest writing and recording time she’s ever gifted herself) and reaching a new place of contentment with her work, the Melbourne-based singer-songwriter would head to the cemetery near her house almost daily to process what she’d just made.
“It’s very peaceful so I would walk around, listening to all the mixes,” she remembers. “There were these two particular graves that I would hang out at and, maybe a month ago, when the record was done, the whole band went back there, had a drink and contemplated the whole experience.
“I said to everyone: ‘Truly, from the bottom of my heart, if this record never comes out, this was just such a beautiful time that I will always remember’,” she continues. “Putting the music out is great, but if I died or if the internet went completely down and all the vinyl factories got destroyed, I genuinely think I would be OK with it because I don’t think I’ve ever had such a satisfying creative experience. And I could never have said that in the past.”
‘The Gem’ marks something of a rebirth for Jacklin. Following three critically-adored records of devastating vulnerability and emotional openness, the 35-year-old has been rethinking her priorities, making changes, and considering how much she wants to keep giving away. It’s not that her fourth – set for release on September 25th on her new home of 4AD following a complete overhaul of her label, management and team – is a closed book by any stretch. Full of characteristically poignant meditations on self-agency, desire and the passing of time, it has the power to frequently stop you in your tracks, as is the Julia Jacklin way. But there’s been a change to the way the singer approaches her work, and perhaps her life as a whole.
“Sometimes [in the past] I’ve been super vulnerable because I’ve wanted people to see me. It comes from a desire to be loved. When I was younger I thought, if I put every single card on the table maybe people will know me and love me. But that’s not how life works,” she considers. “Now I’m OK being more mysterious as I get older because I understand that we’re all unknowable. I actually find when I’m less forthcoming it’s because I’m more secure in myself. When I was younger I wanted to be special, and now I love being like everybody else.”
When I was younger I thought, if I put every single card on the table maybe people will know me and love me. But that’s not how life works
Julia Jacklin
We meet Jacklin in a pretty cafe courtyard on Brighton’s central Lanes. She’s in town for an in-store performance at nearby Resident Records, but – fittingly for the macro scale of today’s conversation – the town also holds a deeper meaning for the singer. “I [briefly] moved here to Brighton when I was 21 and it was such a different time in my life,” she notes. “It’s so nice to be back and be like, ‘Things got wayyyy better’.”
Another move, from hometown Sydney to her current – “and probably forever” – base of Melbourne in 2017 also lies at the centre of ‘The Gem’. The record is named after the local pub that she first began frequenting as a new transplant to the city. A “magical” venue in a suburban residential area where live bands would play every night, it was a place that Jacklin – fresh from releasing 2016 debut ‘Don’t Let The Kids Win’ and on the rise – felt like she could begin to ingratiate herself as life began to change, and where, nearly a decade later, she would go on to record her newest LP in the small studio above on the top floor.
“When I first moved I was already… a bit of a somebody,” she pauses, throwing out the second half of the sentence with a knowing affectation. “I’d moved to Melbourne after the big break-up that became [second album] ‘Crushing’, and I had to put myself back out there to even make friends, which was complicated. There’s a bit of a strangeness when you have a profile as a musician in a scene. It’s easier to make friends because people wanna be friends with you but it’s hard to make good friends, and that’s a dynamic I wasn’t used to. But The Gem was a place I knew I could go by myself and it would always be cool.”
In conversation, Jacklin is prone to casually cutting to the heart of these sorts of topics – the ones that are often a little uncomfortable; that tend to remain unspoken. Being “a bit of a somebody” might have its perks. “I love this work. I love being a songwriter. It’s what I wanted to do as a child and how many people get to live out their childhood dream?” she says at one point. But it also makes people treat you differently.
The cathartic, country-nodding ‘If I Had the Hand Of God’ reflects on the things that the job takes from you, and of the ways in which it inadvertently changes the way you move through the world. “What kind of life is that?” she sings. “After the show / become an outline to everyone you know.”
“Especially as an Australian who has to be away a lot, you end up just not being a part of your friends and family’s lives. You have your road family – and I’ve developed such beautiful relationships with this job – but people [back home] project a lot onto you because of what people associate this job as being. People are very… impressed by this job,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “And I do think it’s cool as fuck too, but it can make people treat you pretty weirdly. It can really change your personal relationships in a way that’s super strange and hard to understand.”
It’s partly why Jacklin decided to start afresh with a new professional team around her. “For a while I had some people in my work life that made it not worth it and I had to make a big gear shift,” she notes. “If I’m gonna keep doing this I just need to have wall to wall legends around me, and no dickheads.” ‘God Sometimes’, with its driving, circular guitar motif and defiant sense of purpose, speaks of finding the strength to make these decisions; of “convincing yourself that you have more power than you do to change your life.”
Two tracks and two gods – as with a lot of the singer’s output, divine beings are everywhere. But, she points out, “I typically use God as myself. ‘I am God,’ says Julia Jacklin,” she laughs, anticipating the headline. In ‘The Gem’, heavenly creatures are used to speak of internal battles or big decisions. “How to feel free, with someone watching over me?”, ‘Angel Vision’ muses. “I’m not a spiritual or a religious person, but I’m forced to live in a world where religion is everywhere and in everything,” she says. “I had to go to Catholic school, I had to go to church with my grandparents, so it just seeped into my language and the way I speak about being alive.”
Freedom is also a subject that the album’s lead single ‘Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)’ playfully wrestles with. On it, Jacklin is actively trying to keep romance at arm’s length. In a previous press quote, she stated that “wanting to love and be loved, but also wanting to feel free” has been “the central question of my life”. Today, however, she’s not so sure.
“I don’t think I even believe that…” she considers. “I wrote that song in 2017, when I was in a completely different headspace. And maybe I used to feel like that but that’s because, when I was younger, I thought that love was supposed to be super hard. Now I realise that the people who really love you, they allow you to be completely yourself, which in turn makes you feel free.”
Releasing an album as a diaristic songwriter – giving people the full Julia Jacklin experience, as she admits to sometimes being aware of (and now actively trying to resist) – seems to necessitate that every expression on a record be completely true to its author’s feelings at the time. “But it’s a good song, so do I not put it out because I don’t feel that way now? I never said I was being honest,” she questions wryly.
“It’s funny, every time I’m making a record, I always worry that it’s not coherent. But I think about myself differently every day. I have a centre that follows me, but my sense of self is changing all the time based on where I am, or who I’m around. The thing about being a human being is sometimes you feel like the coolest, strongest person in the world and the next day you feel like the bigger loser on the planet. That’s what my experience of life is like. I think all of these things coexisting at the same time is more of a reflection on what it means to be alive than having a more coherent album.”
My sense of self is changing all the time based on where I am, or who I’m around. The thing about being a human being is sometimes you feel like the coolest, strongest person in the world and the next day you feel like the bigger loser on the planet.
Julia Jacklin
‘The Gem’ might range in outlook, from the willing supplicancy of ‘Walk On Me’ to the hard-won grit of ‘I Wish’, but there’s a confidence that emanates from both the record and the way that Jacklin speaks of it. We tell her that, on the singer’s Reddit channel, we posted a call out for fan questions and comments. The top voted response was a riff on the meme, ‘Did you kiss the brick before you threw it’ – a modern update on sweetening the pill before digging in the knife.
“Well I think that my greatest strength as a writer is not the devastating lyrics, guys!” she quips. “I think I do great melodies. Melody to me is way more important than the lyrics; I know for a fact that I would not be still doing this four albums later if I wasn’t a good melodist. That’s why my music is good. So be grateful that the sad lyrics are encased in those beautiful melodies and that’s the kiss!”
Her melodies might be a winning smooch, but you can imagine Jacklin’s lyrics inspiring the sort of devoted, intense fanbase that other similarly sucker-punch-inducing singers like Phoebe Bridgers or Mitski have earned in recent years. It’s a high-stakes level of fame that Jacklin, who performed her song ‘Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You’ on stage with Lana Del Rey back in 2019, has seen up close. But having a level of anonymity, and prioritising the other areas of her life alongside her career, is something she’s loath to give up. “I feel like that seems like a pretty traumatic experience. The way that Phoebe’s going about it now, she’s trying to rein that in surely with the no phones [at gigs policy]? Because it can get pretty out of hand…” she considers.
“It’s hard to talk about it because I don’t want to throw any fans under the bus. I understand that the music industry is so different to the way it was when I was growing up and I couldn’t even begin to understand what it’s like to be young now. But I think a lot of musicians would agree that a 500-capacity room is kind of the best, and once it gets bigger than that it becomes something different,” she says carefully. “And I think for me, I’m ambitious and I want people to hear my music, but I like being close to people and not feeling scared for my safety. And to me, it seems like [in some situations] you have to be scared for your safety as a woman and I don’t want to live my life like that.”
Instead, Jacklin’s focus right now is fully on honing her craft and cutting out the external noise – of what she ‘should’ be, what people might want from her, or anything else that might impact the completely “un-self-conscious” expression that ‘The Gem’ has fine-tuned more than ever. She’s excited that songs like the album’s more electronic, glitchy opener ‘Brand New’ are coming closer to the music that she listens to herself. “I don’t listen to heaps of singer-songwriter music or indie rock. I just wanna move more as I get older,” she shrugs. “I was getting really into the Madonna album ‘Music’ when I was making this record, and I’m loving the new Nourished By Time album. I’m listening to a lot of Brandy, and I’m always listening to ‘Blackout’ by Britney Spears…”
Is there an alternate world where Julia Jacklin might have been a snake-charming, fully choreographed pop star?! “I don’t think I’m good enough at moving my body,” she sighs. “I think if I could dance and I felt a bit more secure in my body, I might have gone down that road… I think that’s a common experience with singer-songwriters. We’re too in our heads, which I think is what prevented me from being a pop star.”
Pop’s loss, however, is fans of raw, relatable humanity’s gain. And on ‘The Gem’, Julia Jacklin is removing any barriers and expectations and becoming the kind of artist she’s always wanted to be. “All my heroes are people who just continue making music and focus on that. I genuinely know that’s what would make me have a happy life, if I keep writing songs and they’re good,” she smiles. “As a musician, it feels like you’re meant to say you want to play Coachella; you’re meant to be still striving for something so people can root for you as the underdog. When I was young, I wouldn’t have been able to fathom thinking like I do now: if I’m not special, what am I?!” Jacklin laughs before declaring in the way that, actually, makes her more special than most: “I’m nothing, and it’s great.”
‘The Gem’ is out on September 25 2026. Pre-order now.
