In a search for connection, Julia Jacklin found herself

The opening lines of the first song on Julia Jacklin’s new album, PRE PLEASURE, describe a familiar scene from her childhood in Catholic primary school. “Seated in rows / knees and eyes closed I felt pretty,” she sings. “In the shoes and the dress / confused by the rest, could he hear me?” Despite the school’s daily indoctrination rituals, religion wasn’t something the Australian singer-songwriter-producer felt truly connected to. What stuck with her instead from that time in her life was the music — specifically, songs from the 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. 

“I feel like, when making this record, I was reconnecting with that very young person, that early love of music that came from things like Jesus Christ Superstar and Celine Dion, before I was corrupted by the world,” Julia says over Zoom. “But now I’m in a stage where I’m realising your relationship with music is always going to keep changing, and you have to keep figuring out new ways to deal with that. Those pure times are gone, which sounds a bit sad, but they just are, you know?”

Julia is at home in Melbourne, but she’s getting ready to pack up and leave. She’s embarking on an international tour for PRE PLEASURE, her third album, and won’t return home until mid-December. Her brain feels scattered — has she packed everything she needs for four months away? — but Julia’s also trying to enjoy this period of calm. “I almost feel protective of myself here. It feels more like a rest stop, or someplace outside of music,” she explains. “I’ve spent more time playing shows overseas than I have here, so I don’t associate home with making music. It’s strange, but that’s how it works for me.”

Julia’s relationship with music, and inevitably, her relationship with herself, are topics we keep returning to during our conversation. It’s fitting considering themes of identity and connection are threaded throughout the record. Candid, introspective and even playful at times, the album effectively captures all the rapture and confusion that often get tangled up in self-discovery. It’s an homage to Julia’s younger self and her musical journey so far — spot her Celine Dion lock screen in the “Lydia Wears a Cross” music video, or a Crossroads film poster in the background of “I Was Neon” — but even more than that, it’s a reclamation of her own agency. “Am I gonna lose myself again?” she sings over and over on the latter track. Across PRE PLEASURE’s ten explorative tracks, Julia ruminates on an answer.

The 31-year-old musician has been writing for as long as she can remember. She describes herself as a shy kid “flooded with feelings,” so she spent a lot of time alone, journaling. She grew up in the suburban sprawl of Australia’s Blue Mountains where there wasn’t much to do except hang out in the bush behind her house. “We lived in the uncool part,” she says. “I was desperate to be from up the mountains, that’s where all the creative people lived.”

That yearning for a more creative life led Julia to attend a performing arts high school in Sydney, a move she says totally changed the game. “It was a very bizarre school because it was full of incredibly confident kids with heads full of dreams, which I didn’t particularly share. It definitely challenged me.” The school was a two-hour commute each way. Being from outside the area, she had to audition to get in. She tried out for drama first — drawn to classical theatre, she was very into doing depressing monologues at the time — but was rejected. “The audition process was very theatre-sports. You had to be an extraverted teenager in that way, which I wasn’t. So I got into singing.”

Musical theatre was Julia’s entry point into the world of performing arts, and its influence can still be felt in moments of stylised grandeur on PRE PLEASURE. There’s the aptly titled “Moviegoer”, evoking a hazy, noir-style ambiance with its sultry beat, or the swelling, cinematic strings on “End of a Friendship,” arranged by Arcade Fire composer Owen Pallett and recorded by a full orchestra in Prague. Not to mention Julia’s wardrobe choices for the three PRE PLEASURE music videos she’s released so far; each feels like a character she created, from a Sou’wester-wearing fisherman to a jazz dancer channeling Fred Astaire, all complete with stage makeup and opera gloves.

The swoon-worthy indie rock that Julia’s become know for found its humble beginnings in the cover band she formed with two close friends in high school. “It was like Evanescence and Avril Lavigne covers,” Julia remembers. “We were called Anonymous. I think we played three gigs.” She had terrible stage fright, yet she was desperate to perform. “I was quite introverted and I would get, like, physical reactions from performing. My body would kind of reject it, but I just really, really wanted to do it.”

At 19, Julia joined another band — this time one with original songs — and learned to play guitar, mostly because she wanted to have something to do with her hands onstage. But learning how to play the instrument allowed her the freedom to write her own music, which she started performing at a local bar’s weekly open mic nights. “It was really motivating for me to have a new song every Tuesday to impress my friends,” Julia says. “It didn’t feel like anything too far beyond that.” 

Those songs eventually made their way onto Julia’s first album, Don’t Let the Kids Win, which she released in 2016 to critical acclaim. Since then, Julia’s career has been on a steady rise. She’s won multiple Australian Independent Record Awards, played shows with Lana Del Rey and Courtney Barnett, and toured the globe more than once. PRE PLEASURE might be her third release, but in many ways she feels like she’s still getting used to this job. “It’s hard to draw boundaries: separating yourself from the music, separating the music from your home and just having any boundary around you as an individual outside of your work,” she explains. “If you’re not careful, it basically consumes you and becomes your entire identity, and every second of the day feels like a second you could be using to make music.”

Photography Nick Mckk

This is especially true for an artist like Julia, who’s known for writing achingly raw and personal lyrics. On the pulsing and direct track “Ignore Tenderness,” she sings about the struggle to feel like a sexual being, unable to give herself over to pleasure even while watching porn (“Beneath the sheets you’re just a cave / A plastic bucket, or a grave”). The delicate and vulnerable “Less of a Stranger” is about the nuances of her relationship with her mother (“Never gonna know you / The way that I want to”). Julia has never been afraid to dig deep into her own life for songwriting inspiration. In fact, when it comes to excavating any complicated emotional landscape, she’d rather sing about it than say it. I ask if her Catholic school upbringing had a role to play in that. “Probably,” she admits, then adds, “My family is not a family who likes to talk about how they’re feeling in any capacity.”

Julia is excited to get back on the road after years away due to the pandemic. This tour, which starts in North America on 26 August and then moves onto Europe, will be the first time she plays songs from PRE PLEASURE live with a full band. “I think touring always helps me remember how much I love music,” she says. “I want to really, really work hard to enjoy this tour for what it is, and not be thinking of it as any kind of step up to anything else.”

PRE PLEASURE, which is out this week and was co-produced with Marcus Paquin, is already being described by media outlets and internet stans as her breakout moment. But Julia, who has been a working musician for the better part of a decade, sees titles like “breakout artist” or “up-and-coming” as arbitrary. “We just love that narrative,” she muses. “We love the underdog even when they’re not [one]. Everybody wants to be an underdog while also having success. That’s the sweet spot because once you tip over to the other side people aren’t rooting for you as much.”

Julia thinks a lot about how to define success in her own life, and the answer doesn’t lie in massive awards or mountains of praise. “I’m able to make a living off of this. I feel like people really get what I’m doing, and my shows have, up to this point, felt really manageable and respectful,” she says. “That’s really all I could hope for.”

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Credits

Photography Izzie Austin