Pop songs form in the nebulous space of her albums, but they’re not the rule and neither is die-hard abstraction. The music asks little of its listeners save for the patience to ride it out, and a willingness to linger between modes. The beauty of it is that those words become music.” There’s a lot of text in her work, but it doesn’t demand to be understood semantically and responded to on the spot. Even when there’s lyrics, they’re not functioning like normal words.
That’s one of the things about music that I love-it’s not communication at all. “It really takes a toll on my mental state. “One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m very sensitive and can’t handle a lot of communication all the time,” she says. Holter, who personally finds the clip of the internet overwhelming, explores the opposite logic in her music.
It’s not necessarily that that’s new, but it’s happening in a new way.” New, or at least newly saturated, full of spite and zeal and ridiculous cruelty, our contemporary fascism avails itself of the code of reality TV: Anything’s worth doing, so long as you can get people to look. We have autocratic leaders all over the world now who are challenging human rights. It seems like a time where it’s questioned daily if empathy is a real thing,” Holter says. “I’ve been thinking about love and empathy. It’s enough to make any artist go back to the basics, hit the books, think deeply about what people are like and why. Or, rather, the bad things about the world are louder now, and more enthusiastically celebrated by people in power in a macabre show of dominance. The world has gotten worse since 2016, the year when America’s collective consciousness at last entertained the idea that the world might be bad. The version that ended up on the album sounds like someone breaking out of that haven and returning to the world. She began writing the record in 2016 the original version of “Turn the Light On,” she says, was slower, more soothing. “It came from this language-less human need to immerse myself in sound,” she tells me when I call her at home in Los Angeles. Like much of the electroacoustic pop she’s woven together since she released her debut, Tragedy, in 2011, Aviary started as a kernel of an idea that bloomed. Holter didn’t set out to make a double album, but she let the music sprawl once she realized she needed the space.
The banks come crashing down, the drones fall out of the sky, and everyone builds homes from the rubble.Īviary starts like a movie and it lasts as long as one: 90 minutes on the dot, the length of an independent rom-com or a forgivingly concise blockbuster. It’s the good kind of apocalypse, this song, the one where systems die but people live. Above all that, Holter sings, her voice high and insistent, straining to be heard over the wreckage. It crashes in: bows skidding across the strings of violins, drums tumbling as if down a craggy mountain, horns searing the scene like an irradiated sunset. Importantly, it also gels with the more traditional rock instrumentation that also crops up.“Turn the Light On,” the first song on Julia Holter’s fifth album, begins in tumult. Whether it's the intense crescendo of 'Silhouette', the droning beauty in 'How Long' or the subtle but effective melody toward the end of 'Sea Calls Me Home' (which takes a dash of Brian Wilson influence and filters it through Holter's genius brain), it always plays a huge part. Strings are omnipresent and always used to great effect. It's just that, among the epic, atmospheric sonics and gripping tale of 'Lucette Stranded on the Island' or the warped jazz of 'Vasquez' is something like the playful, jaunty 'Everytime Boots'. Holter continues to make unique music that is hard to categorise. The ideas are still wonderfully off the wall. But she's been marrying this outsider ambition with more easily digestible pop in recent years and Have You In My Wilderness sees her continue in this vein.Įxisting fans needn't worry though. Her musical training and limitless imagination has informed some pretty warped music over the years. Holter's music hasn't always been what you might call accessible. But then Holter's vocal comes in, singing a simple and sweet melody, and, all of a sudden, everything straightens out. Its fractured, complicated rhythms – not just courtesy of drums, but harpsichord, backing vocals and bass as well – are a little disorienting.