The fourth studio album from Julia Jacklin, The Gem, will be released on 25 September and marks the Australian musician’s debut release on 4AD.

The Gem was produced by Jacklin and Robert Muinos and recorded entirely in Melbourne. First single "Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)’"is a bold and fun nod to eighties jangle rock and to the Melbourne sound she fell in love with.

ABOUT THE GEM:
“I want to love and be loved, but I also want to be free. The tension between those two things has been the central question of my life,” says Jacklin. It’s also the theme that underpins The Gem.

When Jacklin first moved to Melbourne from Sydney in 2017, she discovered a little bar on a back street in Collingwood, where bands pushed dining tables to the side and set up in a corner on the floor. She didn’t know anyone in town but knew she wanted to make the city her home, so she started hanging out there, forcing herself out of her comfort zone. The pub was named The Gem.

Fast forward eight years and Jacklin, with three celebrated solo records under her belt – Don’t Let The Kids Win (2016), Crushing (2019), and PRE PLEASURE (2022) – was looking to make a fourth. With time on her hands – she was out of contract with her record label, was searching for a manager – she decided to make the record at home in Melbourne, something she’d never done before.

She called up an old drinking buddy Robert Muinos, owner of Rat Shack studios, which is located above The Gem, and brought in friends Jacob Diamond (guitar), Mimi Gilbert (bass), and Jess Elwood (drums). Recording happened in close quarters, in converted hotel room accommodation upstairs at the pub. As it was a residential bar, they couldn’t record late into the night for fear of bothering the neighbour and sound bleed was a glorious constraint: foot traffic to the hairdresser and the tattoo parlour next door, loud music from the bands and the kitchen crew downstairs. If anyone needed a break from the sessions, they would venture downstairs and watch a band playing. Jacklin and the band even played two unannounced shows there to try out the songs before recording them.

They thought they’d smash out the record in two weeks, like she’d always done, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, it took nearly a year of tinkering to arrive at something Jacklin could get behind. “The Gem felt like a metaphor for the whole process, because a lot of it did feel like digging. I felt like I was doing it almost in the dark, just trusting I was going to find something.” It conjures images of excavation, of reinvention, of trusting your instincts and surrounding yourself with the people and things that make life worthwhile. It’s a soaring document of the songwriter’s journey back to herself.

The band got matching tattoos on the last day of The Gem sessions: a neat little circle to represent an opal – Jacklin’s favourite gemstone. Fittingly, one of the bartenders at The Gem did it. “It did really feel like we’d done something special together. And I think as a group, it felt important to commemorate it. I’m glad we all have these little gems on us.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Brand New
2. God Sometimes
3. If I Had The Hand Of God
4. The Hardest Thing
5. Angel Vision
6. Real Life
7. Get Away From Me (I Think I'll Love You Soon)
8. You Turned On The Tap
9. Walk On Me
10. I Wish

'Pre Pleasure' is the breath-taking third album from Australian singer-songwriter, Julia Jacklin. Co-produced with Marcus Paquin (The Weather Station, The National), 'Pre Pleasure' sees Jacklin as her most authentic self, delivering the most intimate, raw and devastating ten songs of her career to date. An uncompromising and masterful lyricist, always willing to mine the depths of her own life experience, and singular in translating it into deeply personal, timeless songs. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Lydia Wears A Cross
2. Love, Try Not To Let Go
3. Ignore Tenderness
4. I Was Neon
5. Too In Love To Die
6. Less Of A Stranger
7. Moviegoers
8. Magic
9. Be Careful With Yourself
10. End Of A Friendship

The second full-length album from Julia Jacklin, Crushing embodies every possible meaning of its title word. It’s an album formed from sheer intensity of feeling, an in-the-moment narrative of heartbreak and infatuation. And with her storytelling centered on bodies and crossed boundaries and smothering closeness, Crushing reveals how our physical experience of the world shapes and sometimes distorts our inner lives. The follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2016 debut Don’t Let the Kids Win, Crushing finds Jacklin continually acknowledging what’s expected of her, then gracefully rejecting those expectations. As a result, the album invites self-examination and a possible shift in the listener’s way of getting around the world—an effect that has everything to do with Jacklin’s openness about her own experience.

Discussing the record, Jacklin offered the following;

I really like this album, I worked hard on it and I really like listening to it. That's not usually how I feel after making something. I've finally come to accept that right now for me, making records is about capturing a time; who I am at that time, what I need to say in the best way I can say it, with minimal studio frills to cover it up. So I'm really happy to announce this one and ready for whatever things get thrown my way because of it. The cover was hard to figure out, seemed like I couldn't think of what kind of image would represent the music in the right way. Hard deadlines always make me more creative surprisingly. I was on tour in the states with my best bud Nick Mckk who takes a lot of my photos, he took my first album cover. We pulled off the highway in Pennsylvania and found a town called Krumsville. There was an antique store with a very friendly owner who let us run free inside. I got the jumper made the day before in NYC, same day I decided on the album name. I think it works.

Produced by Burke Reid (Courtney Barnett, Liam Finn) and recorded at The Grove Studios, Crushing sets Jacklin’s understated defiance against a raw yet luminous sonic backdrop. “In all the songs, you can hear every sound from every instrument; you can hear my throat and hear me breathing,” she says. “It was really important to me that you can hear everything for the whole record, without any studio tricks getting in the way.”

On the album-opening lead single “Body” - released last month - Jacklin proves the power of that approach, turning out a mesmerizing vocal performance even as she slips into the slightest murmur. A starkly composed portrait of a breakup, the song bears an often-bracing intimacy, a sense that you’re right in the room with Jacklin as she lays her heart out. And as “Body” wanders and drifts, Jacklin establishes Crushing as an album that exists entirely on its own time, a work that’s willfully unhurried.

And whilst a moving and complex listen, Crushing unfolds with an ease that echoes Jacklin’s newfound self-reliance as an artist. “With the first album I was so nervous and didn’t quite see myself as a musician yet, but after touring for two years, I’ve come to feel like I deserve to be in that space,” she says. Throughout Crushing, that sense of confidence manifests in one of the most essential elements of the album: the captivating strength of Jacklin’s lyrics. Not only proof of her ingenuity and artistic generosity, Jacklin’s uncompromising specificity and infinitely unpredictable turns of phrase ultimately spring from a certain self-possession in the songwriting process.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's no surprise that 'Crushing' shares a producer with the most recent Courtney Barnett opus, with it's infectious hooks and Jacklin's singular vocal talent shining through in a rich, sumptuous sea of satisfyingly crunchy guitar and thick percussion. All of this merely highlights Jacklin's unmistakable ear for melody and perfectly constructed melodic indie-rock. This is an absolute winner, and an undoubtable career high.

TRACK LISTING

1. Body
2. Head Alone
3. Pressure To Party
4. Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You
5. When The Family Flies In
6. Convention
7. Good Guy
8. You Were Right
9. Turn Me Down
10. Comfort

Julia Jacklin releases her highly anticipated debut album, ‘Don’t Let The Kids Win’, on Transgressive Records.

Hailing from the Australian Blue Mountains, Julia Jacklin’s music courses with the aching current of alt-country and indie-folk, augmented by her undeniable calling cards: her rich, distinctive voice and her playful, observational wit.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Sadly sung vocals are placed delicately atop swooning country instrumentals and jazzy slide guitars, elsewhere stripped back to the bare bones of Jacklin's soulful voice over a softly picked acoustic guitar backdrop. Heartfelt and touching to the end, and a great sign of what's to come.

TRACK LISTING

Pool Party
Leadlight
Coming Of Age
Elizabeth
Motherland
Small Talk
L.A. Dream
Sweet Step
Same Airport
Hay Plain
Don’t Let The Kids Win