Having flirted with acting, Julia Jacklin eventually found herself in Montreal, speed-writing a follow-up to the acclaimed Crushing on a Roland keyboard in view of Leonard Cohen’s house. In the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, July 21 and available to buy from our online store – Tom Pinnock hears how she came up with a modern classic by crossing Celine Dion with Goblin. “I was trying to keep the beauty,” Jacklin says, “but make sure it was never getting too pretty.”
Every Thursday night, in a brightly lit suburban strip mall above a dental surgery, Julia Jacklin searched for new horizons. She’d already tried tap-dancing and screenwriting classes in her adopted city of Melbourne; now she was enrolled on an acting course. “It was hilariously bad,” she laughs, “just excruciating. It was this very bizarre group of people shoved together in this small room for three hours each week. I was going through a bit of a crisis during the pandemic. I guess, like a lot of musicians, I was trying to extend my artistic repertoire.”
In part, Jacklin’s new pursuits were an attempt to decompress after the pressures of making and touring her second album, 2019’s Crushing. A powerful, wry examination of relationships and sexual dynamics, delivered via the Australian’s truly classic, burnt-honey voice, it established her as an artist to be taken seriously – except, that is, when Jacklin herself is joking around. A lockdown mercifully put an end to that acting course after six weeks, but it was enough to make her reset her goals completely towards music. “Yeah, I think I’ve got to stay in my lane.”
Fittingly, new album Pre Pleasure might just be her best yet: across 10 tracks, it pairs the tortured and imagistic lyrics of Crushing with more accessible and bolder musical textures, at times lushly orchestral or crisply fuzzy, at others intimately stripped down. “I was trying to keep the beauty and the joy and the easy listening side of Robyn, Luther Vandross and Celine Dion,” she explains of her unusual influences, “but make sure it was never getting too pretty. And that’s where, like, Throbbing Gristle and Goblin came in…”
Uncut first catches up with Jacklin via videocall while she’s on a short trip to Tasmania. She’s come away for a few days on her own, hoping to work on some new songs. As seems to be the way with her mercurial muse, however, little actual writing has occurred. “What have I been doing? I don’t know! Not much, honestly. Walking. I’ve been buying books that I probably won’t read for a while. I’m in a real memoir phase at the moment, so I bought David Sedaris’ new one, and Alice Walker’s journals. I’m enjoying reading other people’s thoughts at the moment.”
“The most obvious thing about Julia’s music is just how personal her lyrics are,” explains Marcus Paquin, who co-produced Pre Pleasure with Jacklin in Montreal. “She speaks of her own journey through self-discovery and feelings of inadequacy – and she’s able to express those ideas poetically.”
“She has such a cinematic vision,” adds Fran Keaney of Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, fellow Melbourne residents and occasional collaborators. “It’s such neat storytelling – her songs are almost like Raymond Carver short stories.”
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