JULIA HOLTER - Materia

There are albums that, within a discography, have a reason for existing beyond pure, indefinable beauty; the latest chapter in Julia Holter's catalogue is one of them.
"Materia" is, in truth, only on paper the American songwriter's new record: it's better understood as a companion piece to the excellent "Something In The Room She Moves". That album had been a deeply therapeutic project for the American composer, who had to confront the loss of her voice and her inspiration in the wake of lockdown, eventually finding refuge in a redemptive new artistic perspective.
It's understandable, then, that Julia Holter would retrace her steps to rework some pages of the boldest project of her career.

That album, a shining manifesto of creative situationism and a conscious rejection of perfection, revealed itself through the wonder and primal sense of awe of a newborn, with motherhood and inner rebirth branding every single track of "Something In The Room She Moves", even though the story is still being written. "Materia" is not merely a delicate jazz-noir excursion, but also one of the most spiritual chapters in Julia Holter's output, deeply inspired by the complex, revolutionary figure of the nun Hildegard von Bingen. Reinventing her understated, visionary sonic tapestries is yet another act of love for an art form that manages to stay untouched by the ironclad logic of music as mere consumer product. Beware, though, of dismissing the album as a self-referential, predictable exercise.

The reinterpretation first unfolds on "Materia 2" through a contamination built on dreamy drum machine pulses: here, Jessika Kenney's second voice takes on the task of defining the ethereal melodic structure hinted at by Holter's voice-as-instrument. "Materia 3" follows, deframenting and slowing down the hypnagogic vein of the second chapter until it becomes bloodless, skeletal and fleeting; an attitude that the little more than two minutes of "Clepsydra" reshape through dissonant electronic arpeggios and an indefinable dreamlike grace.
A deliberately fragmented album, "Materia" drifts between electro-ambient and art-pop with the same icy class as ever. "The Laugh Is In The Eyes" sounds as if it could have come from an unreleased collaboration between Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, alternating the magical sound of flute with a poignant bass solo. Even more ambitious is "My Lost One", an art-pop whisper that, like a cloud turning into rain, feeds on ethereal textures and the sinuous sound of the bass to rise up, majestic.
This brilliant art-pop substance had already been partly previewed by the single "Fantasy", a delightful sampler of sounds and rhythms in which Virginia Astley and Ryuichi Sakamoto seem to walk arm in arm, before the track fades into twilight tones.

The real highlight for those who appreciate the American artist's more transcendental side arrives with the ten minutes and sixteen seconds of “My Twin”. Music-box tones, electronic pitches, floating synths and trembling, oddball rhythms give life to an unusual symphony for occasional instruments. Improvisation takes the reins of the harmonic geometries, once again crossing those boundaries with contemporary music that Julia Holter had already learned to tame in her own imagination back in the days of “Ekstasis”. The track unfolds in a succession of notes and undefined sonic spaces that seem to fall into place at random, until it reaches an ecstatic, shifting structure that evolves with impressive naturalness, yet remains original and even unsettling.

That “Materia” is a companion piece to what was expressed in the previous record is obvious; what's genuinely surprising is the sheer number of ideas for an imaginary, fairy-tale chamber-jazz orchestra. This is a dynamic yet diaphanous, impalpable record, a deliberately unfinished work that brings to light that sometimes fleeting beauty which escapes traditional categorization to become pure sensory experience. “Materia” thus reveals itself not as a simple epilogue, but as an open threshold onto the radiant future of an artist who has made her own vulnerability her greatest creative strength.

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23/08/2026