Julia Holter - Bodily Metamorphoses

On the occasion of the release of her recent single “The Laugh Is In The Eyes”, we caught up with Julia Holter to talk about the connections between this new song and “Something In The Room She Moves”, one of the albums we loved most this past year. On “The Laugh Is In The Eyes”, the American singer-songwriter's voice dances among floral flutes, bursts of color and delicate soundscapes, choreographing a gorgeous art-pop composition. As on the LP, physical, bodily sensations are heightened here too through synesthetic play, lending scents to words, colors to music, sounds to smells. Julia Holter's new creations are a fully visionary, all-encompassing experience, without ever being psychedelic or hallucinatory, cutting across everything around us to reveal a continuum within cosmic matter, starting from a fluid making and unmaking of human and non-human bodies. It feels a bit like Ovid, a bit like Epicurus, and a bit like posthuman philosophy, yet also a sonic world deeply rooted in the bodily and personal experiences lived by its creator. We spoke with Julia Holter about all of this in the interview below, reported here in full.

Hi Julia! Congratulations on your latest album! It was one of our favorite records of 2024. I also really loved the single you recently released, so I thought we could start this interview by talking about that song. “The Laugh Is In The Eyes” struck me as a metaphorical celebration of the human imagination and its transformative power.
Thank you so much for the support! Yes, I get that same feeling listening to “The Laugh Is In The Eyes”. In general, much of “Something In The Room She Moves” explores how sensations shift during transformations of state, in the most basic sense of the term — like when we're stuck inside the house, then we step outside and smell the flowers; it's meant to musically evoke exactly those experiences of change.

The title of the new single is drawn from the lyrics of the song “Spinning” (which, incidentally, is gorgeous). Why and how are these two songs connected?
I wrote “The Laugh Is In The Eyes” over the past few months, and it grew out of a Logic file I'd created while working on “SITRSM”. So it's actually not an old song, it's completely new, but since it developed out of that file, it's connected to the album. Also, the interest in sensations and colors feels akin to what I did on “SITRSM”.

In “Spinning”, after a sudden moment of blindness (“Some cologne leaving me blind/ The laugh is in the eyes/ The joke is mine”), a multisensory, synesthetic vision unfolds. Could the new track be the result of this blazing epiphany? “The Laugh Is In The Eyes” also has a nocturnal, mysterious atmosphere.
Yes, I think it's all of that, but there's also a bit of daylight in it. It feels to me like it has a kind of combination of day and night; if “Sun Girl” expresses a sort of desire to escape from the sun, and “Evening Mood” and “Spinning” dwell in the mysterious night, the new single finds mystery in brightness, in color and in daylight.

I was very intrigued by the fact that “Something In The Room She Moves” opens with a mantra that acts as an invocation to the sun. It reminded me a lot of a literary topos common in classical but also medieval poetry (in Italian, Dante's “Paradiso”), the invocation to the muses and to Apollo (god of the sun, but also god of music and poetry). “Sun Girl” seems to play ironically with this lyrical tradition. In that sense, I'd say your latest work could be read as a modern reinvention of Ovid's “Metamorphoses”, given that bodily transformation and love are also central themes in your songs. Are these models you draw on intentionally?
I wasn't looking at any literary tradition, but maybe you've picked up on something really interesting! We definitely always look to natural sources for poetic inspiration: it's a way of trying to explore a feeling and share it with other people, because the sun touches all of us, we need it, we feel warmed and calmed by it, we feel overwhelmed by its intensity, and so on. The same goes for the ocean, or for trees, and so on.

In “Materia” you sing: “Can you fool a mystery sea?/ On the rough womb/ Summer bathing on a stretch of/ Memory mistaken for what’s here right now”. It seems like every possible (re)birth and material transformation passes through this watery womb. Why does water play such a central role in the sequence of bodily metamorphoses on “SITRSM”?
I don't know, I was channeling this mystery, this darkness (as in Hélène Cixous's text “Writing Blind”, which I've referenced elsewhere when talking about “Spinning”), and then the underwater dimension got added on. While I was writing these songs, I was pregnant or had just given birth, and in that experience the body was central, and much of the body is made up of water and fluids. So that's probably where it started, but focusing on water wasn't a deliberate choice: it just happened.

What inspired the visual side of this album? The “Spinning” video clip seems connected to your friend's painting that you chose for the album cover.
Yes, sisters Nicola and Juliana Giraffe made the video for “Spinning” and drew inspiration from Christina Quarles's painting (“Wrestlin'”), which is on the album cover. But it's pure coincidence that the parachute they used matches the painting so well. It was wild! In general, I chose Quarles's painting because I love the complexity of the body's movement in that piece: it just felt like the right image for “SITRSM”.

Are you already working on something new? Can you tell us anything about it?
Yes, but I can never really explain what I'm working on while I'm doing it. I'm still trying to figure out what it is myself!

(Interview published on January 1, 2025)

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