Julia Holter – Something In the Room She Moves

After the resounding success of 2015’s Have You In My Wilderness, Julia Holter doggedly stuck to her experimental origins with the clattering, to some impenetrable, (Alice) Coltranisms of Aviary. Six years later she returns with a record that balances the impulses of pop and experimentalism with deft skill, walking a tightrope between cosmic vastness and subtlety.

Holter’s instrumentation may have broadened to be more consistently orchestral, but the forms of her songs are still loose and exploratory; music that can seem to be meandering until the most gorgeous of hooks blows through and completely reshapes it. But there’s an intimacy to this record that hasn’t been in Holter’s music for some time. Evening Mood masterfully strikes this balance, shuffling forward like a badger through woodlands until the whole thing elevates, Holter’s voice keeping it gossamer delicate whilst everything else around grows and swirls.

Barring the magnificently punchy Spinning, most of the record moves in these wafts and drifts, beauty dissipating as quickly as it appears, only to reemerge in a different form just as quickly. But it’s an album that worms its way into you, slowly revealing more and more of itself with each listen, layers of intricacies shifting beneath its drifting beauty.

Listen to: Spinning, Evening Mood, These Morning