When Julia Holter contracted COVID midway through finishing her sixth record, she had no choice but to rent a studio and record the vocals at the same time as the mixing. Under any ordinary professional logic, this would be a catastrophe. Instead, she later said, something unlocked: "All the words that I had been trying to come up with for two years suddenly came out." The constraint forced her hand and the pressure freed her voice. That is a good summary of how Julia Holter works.
Something in the Room She Moves was released on March 22, 2024, through Domino. It is her first studio album since Aviary in 2018 and her most plainly human. It is also, in a way that resists easy praise, a harder album to dismiss than anything she has made before.
From Tragedy to Presence
Holter released her debut, Tragedy, in 2011 as a kind of compositional thesis project. It was built from Euripides, it was recorded in her bedroom, and it arrived with almost no audience. She was a CalArts graduate student studying under composer Michael Pisaro, who was among the most rigorous figures in American avant garde music, and her work at that point carried the nervous energy of someone who had absorbed every serious influence available and was still figuring out what to do with it.
Ekstasis followed in 2012 and moved toward something more sensory and pop adjacent, if still oblique. Loud City Song in 2013 borrowed from a 1944 musical called Gigi and compressed that borrowing into something that sounded nothing like its source. Each record felt like a position paper. She was arguing for a kind of music that could hold literary reference and visceral pleasure at the same time without requiring the listener to choose.
By Have You in My Wilderness in 2015 the argument had won. That album reached the Mercury Prize shortlist and pulled serious critical attention from quarters that had previously been curious but not converted. Her voice, which critics had always compared to Siouxsie Sioux and Nico, finally had arrangements that matched its authority.
The Six Year Gap
Aviary in 2018 was the record she made before she knew she needed to change direction. It ran nearly an hour. It was sprawling, orchestral, almost willfully difficult. Critics called it ambitious, which is sometimes just a polite way of saying exhausting. It was also genuinely impressive, a work that trusted its own internal logic so completely that the listener either surrendered or did not.
Then she had a daughter. Then her eighteen year old nephew died. Then a pandemic. Then a teaching appointment at Occidental College, where she took the endowed chair in songwriting. Then six years of a life that apparently needed to be lived before it could be made into music.
The gap between Aviary and Something in the Room She Moves is not just time. It is the distance between an artist who made work about the world and one who started making work about the specific textures of her own days.
An Album About a Body in a Room
The title comes from a modification of the Beatles song Something, which Holter encountered while watching The Beatles: Get Back documentary with her daughter. She changed the phrase from something in the way she moves to something in the room she moves and the shift is the point. It is about physicality contained in a space. It is about being present.
The musicians she assembled for the record are not session players in any ordinary sense. Devra Hoff plays fretless bass with a tonal quality that sits somewhere between a cello and a question mark. Chris Speed's saxophone and clarinet work threads through tracks without announcing itself. Her husband Tashi Wada plays a Prophet 6 synthesizer and bagpipes on the same album. Ramona Gonzalez, Mia Doi Todd, and Jessika Kenney contribute additional vocals. Heba Kadry mastered. Kenny Gilmore coproduced and mixed.
The album was recorded at 64 Sound and 101 Recording, both in Los Angeles. Holter's grandfather's lap steel guitar appears on it. The cover art is a painting called Wrestling by Christina Quarles.
Sun Girl and the Nursery Rhyme Question
The opening track, Sun Girl, was built deliberately around the sensibility of a nursery rhyme. Holter constructed it from flute, fretless bass, and toy percussion, and she was serious about the assignment. A nursery rhyme is one of the few musical forms that is meant to work across every age at the same time. It should mean something different to a three year old and to the adult holding the three year old and to the adult who once was a three year old and remembers being held.
Holter is a composer by training, and the decision to pursue that particular simplicity was not naive. It was targeted. She was writing music that would live in a specific room where a specific child existed, and she was trying to make something that could survive being heard on repeat at six in the morning.
Spinning, the second single released ahead of the album, operates differently. It is the record's most outwardly unsettled piece, turning through something that never quite resolves. Holter later said it emerged from the experience of losing her nephew while simultaneously watching her daughter come into the world. Two things that cannot coexist and yet did.
Evening Mood and Ponyo
Evening Mood is the most explicitly domestic song Holter has written. She made it after watching Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo with her daughter. The film is about a goldfish who wants to be human, and about what it costs to become something you were not born as, and about whether the world can absorb a transformation that should be impossible. Holter did not explain the connection at length. She did not need to.
The production on Evening Mood is described as liquid, which is accurate in the way that liquid describes water rather than the glass it fills. It moves around itself. It does not settle.
The Cultural Position She Now Occupies
Holter has been teaching at Occidental College since 2021. She composed the score for Eliza Hittman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always in 2020, a film about a teenager seeking an abortion in New York, which was precisely not the kind of project you expect from a composer known for chamber pop references to Euripides. She also performed an original score for a 1928 screening of Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. She keeps making choices that refuse to confirm what her audience already thinks of her.
Something in the Room She Moves landed at number nine on the UK Independent Albums chart. It appeared in numerous year end lists. It has been praised as her most accessible record and her most adventurous record by different critics writing at the same time about the same album. Both claims are defensible. The album is not trying to reconcile them.
What Holter represents in 2024 and beyond is something more specific than critical acclaim. She is an example of what happens when formal rigor meets actual life and the formal rigor does not win automatically. She made five albums that were arguments. Then she made one that was a room. You can hear the difference immediately and you cannot explain it easily, which is the whole point.
