Julia Jacklin has been steadily gathering momentum, from her 2016 debut, Don’t Let The Kids Win, to Crushing, Pre Pleasure, and coming in September, The Gem, her first release with a musician’s dream label, 4AD. When we speak over a coffee and croissant, we traverse her thoughts on maturing, reserving the right to change her mind, and having fun.
As to be expected with creative growth and the time it takes to write, record, mix, master and promote a record, there is some distance between Jacklin and her former work. “I always find that hard to say myself, honestly, because I don’t listen to my old stuff,” she says when I ask whether the record marks a departure. “If it comes on in a café or something, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, nice,’ but I don’t really remember what it sounds like.” For Jacklin, a record does not feel like a ‘reinvention' so much as evidence of a life proceeding at its natural pace. “People only hear from me every three or four years, but I’m obviously living my life, and a lot happens in that time,” she says. “It never feels different to me because I’m making it as who I am right now. But I forget that people have these markers of me every three or four years. I genuinely feel like I change so much during that period.”
For those who are well versed in Jacklin’s back catalogue, The Gem does feel different. Its vulnerability is no less immediate than that of Jacklin’s previous records, but it is attended by a new composure. The sound is folk-centric, rougher at its edges and seemingly less interested in disguising the conditions of its making. If this is sophistication, it is not the sophistication of accumulation, it is the assurance required to remove what does not belong or no longer serves Jacklin as an artist. Jacklin understands that assurance as one of the gifts of age. “I feel more myself and more comfortable with myself than I ever have, which is such an amazing part of getting older,” she says. “I think that’s reflected in the production on this record.”
Following the success of her second record, Crushing, Jacklin felt the peculiar pressure of making a third: the sense that the next gesture must be larger, more emphatic, more visibly accomplished. “I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got to do something bigger,’ and bigger to me meant strings and using the computer more,” she says. “But I’m not a computer person.”
She is not repudiating Pre Pleasure. “I really love my last record,” she is careful to say, and she remains glad she followed its production choices to their conclusion. However, the experience revealed the distance between what expansion was supposed to look like and what she actually wanted to hear. “With my last record, I felt I did certain things because I was supposed to,” she says. “This one feels more like the kind of music I love listening to. Sometimes it’s hard to give yourself permission to make that kind of music.”
“With my last record, I felt I did certain things because I was supposed to. This one feels more like the kind of music I love listening to. Sometimes it’s hard to give yourself permission to make that kind of music.”
Permission recurs throughout our conversation, as it does with many female artists who often have to fight against hidden patriarchal industry standards. Yet for Jacklin, it is permission to make the music she likes, to trust her own scale, to resist the seductions of polish. Jacklin invokes Gillian Welch as the sort of artist whose apparent simplicity can feel strangely inaccessible, not because it is technically impossible, but because admiration creates its own hierarchy. “You think, ‘But that’s Gillian Welch. She can do that. I can’t make a record that’s rough and ready.’” The work, then, became an attempt to distinguish an individual desire from an industry reflex. “I was really trying to make sure I was doing what I wanted as an individual person,” Jacklin says, “rather than as somebody who exists solely within the music industry.”
Her recent signing to 4AD might appear to complicate this resistance to external validation. Few independent labels retain such a distinct curatorial aura; its name still functions as both history and aesthetic shorthand. “The infrastructure is very different now, but I think of it as a curatorial home,” she says. “They’re one of the last labels people really trust. For better or worse, people trust their taste, and I can already feel people treating me a little differently.” She remembers experiencing the same shift in perception when Aldous Harding signed to the label. Jacklin had already been a fan from the beginning, yet the announcement produced its own sense of recognition. “I thought, ‘Wow, she’s been recognised.’” A 4AD signing can still resemble a cultural anointing, but for Jacklin the label’s approval follows rather than determines the work. The Gem’s defining decisions were made through a more private process of discernment.
Jacklin does not write towards abundance, adhering to a quality not quantity approach, noting the songs themselves contain myriads. Where some artists assemble an album by producing a hundred songs and selecting 10, she works with an almost opposite economy. “I cannot relate,” she laughs. “I can’t even relate to having a deluxe album. I don’t have extra tracks. Everything I want people to hear is on the record.” Songs arrive when they arrive, a fact she describes as one of the frightening realities of creative work: one never feels entirely in command of it. Angel Vision, now on The Gem, was first intended for Pre Pleasure, but its meaning had not yet revealed itself. Jacklin will sometimes possess a melody or chorus for years before she understands what the song requires of her. “Even if what I’m saying is very simple – it’s not that I’m waiting to find something with depth – it has to be honest, and it has to feel worth saying,” she explains. Most of the songs on The Gem took somewhere between six months and four years to complete.
This is not perfectionism for its own sake rather it is an ethical relationship to output. In a culture that treats continuous production as a condition of relevance, Jacklin remains alert to the difference between expression and mere addition. “There’s so much output now, and I try to be really intentional about what I put out,” she says. “I don’t want to add more noise to this noisy world unless it feels worthwhile.” Intentionality is often mistaken for certainty, but The Gem was built on Jacklin’s willingness to revise and revisit. The most important practice she developed was allowing herself to change her mind. In a studio, small capitulations can accumulate: an idea is accepted because no better answer is immediately available; a decision becomes permanent simply because the process has moved on. Jacklin knows how those choices can later become “thorns in my side.”
“I don’t want to add more noise to this noisy world unless it feels worthwhile.”
“You can even reach the point where you’ve finished the whole song and know you didn’t get it right, but think, ‘I can’t redo it,’” she confesses. “With this record, I tried so hard not to let anything slip by.” The album was finished, and Jacklin held a small party at her house to celebrate. A week later, she admitted to herself that it was not yet where she wanted it to be. The people around her responded with trust: “Julia, whatever you want!” It was a degree of support she had not experienced before, and it required her to overcome the ingrained impulse to remain accommodating. There is a revealing contradiction in the way culture understands artists. We romanticise volatility once it has become anecdote, but resist the inconvenience of an artist exercising uncertainty in real time. “People love rock-and-roll stories, but how would they react if they were in the room?” Jacklin asks, and when I suggest it was hardly likely she was throwing televisions out of windows or destroying gear, this was confirmed. “I wasn’t throwing televisions, but I was trying to allow myself to be an artist.”
To allow that is to accept that the process “isn’t linear.” It can be chaotic; it can frustrate other people. Yet Jacklin’s responsibility ultimately lies with the finished work she must promote, perform and press into physical matter. “I don’t want to waste literal physical materials by printing something I don’t really love.” The record’s immediacy was also preserved through a deceptively simple method: Jacklin and her band recorded together without headphones. “I will never go back,” she says. Headphones made her feel as though she had never played guitar before. “With headphones, you’re already editing yourself and imagining the finished product,” she says. Without them, the musicians could protect the scrappiness Jacklin values, the quality that indicates people are listening and responding to one another rather than performing towards an imagined perfection.
Our conversation wanders towards in-ear monitors and the young bands who seem, as Jacklin puts it, to have been “born wearing” them. (This is partly a personal prejudice when I see bands wearing them outside of stadium performances, it doesn’t make you look cool, struggle to hear yourself in the wedges, please.) “You become obsessed with how it sounds when you should just be having fun,” Jacklin says. “You learn to have fun first, and the more you do it, the more you can hone the sound. If you focus on perfecting the live sound from the beginning, you deprive yourself of one of the greatest joys of this work.”
“People love rock-and-roll stories, but how would they react if they were in the room? I wasn’t throwing televisions, but I was trying to allow myself to be an artist.”
The Gem’s emotional vocabulary was shaped not only by music but by the Australian cinema Jacklin grew up watching: Looking for Alibrandi, Muriel’s Wedding, The Castle and Wake in Fright. What connects these otherwise disparate films is their ability to hold darkness, absurdity and whimsy inside the same frame. “Having all of those things coexist is really important to me in music,” she says. The designation “confessional singer-songwriter” can imply an unrelieved seriousness that does not correspond with how Jacklin sees her work. She points to fellow Australian artist Laura Jean, as someone who allows sorrow and humour to alter one another along with the greats such as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell who are funny, too. “And that’s actually what makes it sad.” Humour prevents confession from hardening into solemnity, and the joyful contrast can often amplify or explain the pain.
As I spoke to Jacklin ahead of the album’s release, I’m conscious that this can be a very apprehensive time for artists, before their largely insular work meets the world. “I feel really, really good about it this time,” she says. In the past, criticism had the power to locate doubts she already carried, “If someone criticises something you don’t fully love yourself, you’re like, ‘You’re right.’” A listener encounters a record as a declaration by a singular artist; they cannot see the forgotten afternoon on which she failed to object, or the compromise that outlived the circumstances that produced it. However, this time Jacklin tried to protect her future self. She cannot ensure that everybody will like The Gem (we have a strong suspicion they will), but she can ensure that another person’s dislike will not expose a disavowed choice. “That was the best I could do,” she says. “That was exactly what I wanted to do. With this record, I literally did the best I could at the time, and I can say that with my full chest,” Jacklin says. “That’s all you can control. If I’m in charge of the things I can control, I feel much more resilient towards the things I can’t.”
In previous release cycles, the combination of private compromise and public exposure left her feeling “like an exposed nerve.” Now, as The Gem moves beyond the room in which it was made and towards the strangers who will form their own relationships with it, Jacklin is impatient rather than afraid. “Who knows how I’ll feel later,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Let’s go!’ I can’t wait for it to be out.”
Jacklin's fourth studio album, The Gem, is out 25 September 2026.
