PHOTOGRAPHY Amy Peskett
WORDS & CREATIVE DIRECTION Tori West
PRODUCTION Chiara Maculan
FASHION Baillie Jones
MUA Maya Man
HAIR Shanice Noel
SOCIALS Richie Barker
FASHION ASSISTANT Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin
SPECIAL THANKS TO 4AD PR
ON THE COVER Julia wears Top: MAXIMILLIAN RAYNOR, skirt: ROKIT VINTAGE, boots: ACNE STUDIOS
There’s an exhaustingly metric-driven assumption underpinning the music industry’s idea of success: that everything should keep getting bigger. “You think the longer you do this, everything’s supposed to level up. But then it’s like, what does levelling up even mean?” Jacklin tells me over the phone from her bedroom in her hometown of Melbourne.
With three acclaimed albums already under her belt, her 2019 album, Crushing, and her follow-up, 2022’s Pre Pleasure, helped Jacklin break through internationally. Perhaps the next expected step was to gain access to more prestigious studios, growing audiences and higher personal ambitions to signal “progress”. But Julia Jacklin’s latest record was born from the exact opposite impulse.
“I genuinely don’t like those big recording studios. I feel like as soon as I walk in, I feel immediate pressure, and I’m a bit like, what is this environment?” she explains. “I’m never in rooms like this, but I’m suddenly supposed to make magic happen and be myself and experiment in a place that has no natural light and is just a bit claustrophobic.”
Instead, Jacklin tucked herself into a cosy corner above The Gem, her local pub in Melbourne, in a space where friends drop in, and she could people-watch from the studio window while regulars carried on with their evenings of open mics and pub quizzes downstairs. “There’s a tattoo artist next door, there’s a hairdresser down the hall, and we’re all just here to work.”
Her fourth album, The Gem, takes its name from the beloved boozer, where ordinary life existed within touching distance of the music she was carefully crafting. For Jacklin, that ordinariness was exactly the point, “Julia’s had a minute to think, and she’s at her favourite pub with her friends making music that she likes,” she says. That sense of looseness makes its way into the music, too. The Gem is full of jangling guitars, bright melodic hooks and the easy interplay of a band who know each other well, with the energy of Melbourne’s live music scene running through it. There’s a warmth and playfulness to the record that feels closely tied to the circumstances in which it was made: friends playing together above a pub, surrounded by the ordinary noise of life continuing downstairs.
After more than a decade of songwriting, touring and slowly rising through the ranks to become a globally recognised public figure, Jacklin seems less interested in “levelling up”, turning her life into content or chasing that one viral TikTok soundbite. Instead, she’s thinking about a different kind of success: how to make music without sacrificing the life happening around it. “I just really wanted to fuse them together,” she explains. The Gem gave her a way to do exactly that. “The Gem and that experience were more about just me doing what I needed to do to enjoy my life more. I was sick of not being at home.”
I’m constantly like, can someone just limit my options? I would love that.
The 36-year-old’s reassessment arrives amid a broader pushback against the level of access now expected of musicians. Jacklin is glad to see artists like Phoebe Bridgers’ phone-free shows, pushing back against the expectation that musicians should be endlessly available to their audiences. For her, setting those boundaries isn’t only about protecting the artist; there’s also a “duty of care” to younger fans growing up in a culture where constant access has become the default. Sometimes, having fewer choices can be its own kind of relief. “I’m constantly like, can someone just limit my options? I would love that.”
The insistence on making the job work for her has also changed how she approaches making an album. Jacklin admits she wrapped up the record, but realised it was missing something. “It was over, and then I kind of started the process again… because I was like, wait, I didn’t enjoy that. I need to enjoy this. So I spent another six months on it and had the best time.” She pauses to reflect on her process. “It wasn’t even really about making the music better.”
As creative people, we’re so often chasing whatever comes next while being incredibly critical of what we’ve already made. However, there’s something truly radical in allowing the creative process itself to be enough, rather than measuring its value entirely by what could come out the other side. She admits that if you don’t have positive memories attached to the process of creating something, it’s then a lot harder to want to promote the final outcome. “Unless I’m enjoying making music videos, I’m just not going to do it,” Jacklin insists. “I’m not putting on a dress and being in front of a camera for one second if I’m not enjoying it.”
Given everything she tells me about reassessing the life she wants to lead, it feels particularly apt that The Gem opens with a track titled ‘Brand New’, ending on the line “I’m free now, let me be brand new.” What exactly Jacklin is seeking freedom from, however, has to remain deliberately unclear. “I wish I could just tell the truth. I really do, sometimes,” she admits. What she can say is that it came from “a situation that I got myself out of. That was a long one, and it was quite difficult to get out of.”
She wrote the song “in a state of beautiful delusion”, imagining the clean break we’re so often promised after leaving something difficult, as if grappling with everything it left behind simply didn’t have to exist. Reality is, of course, much messier. “Recovery from those kinds of relationships is not linear. Wouldn’t it be cool if it’s over, and now I’m a brand new person, and I won’t feel any drawn-out weird feelings about that?”
There’s a tension at the heart of the song between wanting to begin again and accepting that a new beginning doesn’t necessarily produce a new person. Jacklin calls it “a song of hope, manifestation and delusion. But ultimately, I know that I will still be myself, which is good. I do like myself a lot.”
Unless I’m enjoying making music videos, I’m just not going to do it. I’m not putting on a dress and being in front of a camera for one second if I’m not enjoying it.
Dress: SUSAN FANG
Perhaps that’s the more interesting transformation happening across The Gem: enjoying making something, trusting that she’s satisfied with her own creation and, ultimately, trusting herself. Becoming “brand new” might be a fantasy, but learning to value the person who remains feels far more tangible. That sense of self-determination continues across the record. On ‘God Sometimes’, Jacklin turns towards the idea that, at some point, you have to take ownership of where your life goes next. “The longer I do this job, I realise what my bigger goal is beyond making great music: it’s trying to lead a great life, then hopefully that informs the music.”
More than a decade into her career, that has also meant becoming more protective of herself and more discerning of her own accessibility, admitting success makes people treat you differently. “I care about myself a lot more as an individual person, in my personal life, now than I probably ever have,” she asserts. “I just have a better radar now for the kinds of people that are going to treat me normally and kindly.”
I care about myself a lot more as an individual person, in my personal life, now than I probably ever have. I just have a better radar now for the kinds of people that are going to treat me normally and kindly.
Aside from a collaboration with Faye Webster on a duet of her track “Good Guy” in 2024, Jacklin doesn’t co-write any of her lyrics, has no major-label machine weighing in while she works, and is the record’s sole composer. There is, however, one other person she’d happily make an exception for: her long-time musical hero, Céline Dion. But until that call comes, Jacklin’s songwriting remains a solo affair.
“My whole thing with music is it’s a conversation between me, myself and I, and we need to be honest with each other.” Increasingly, that honesty means trusting her own taste rather than trying to anticipate whether an audience will like what she puts into the world. She knows what happens when she doesn’t. “One comment saying, ‘I don’t know about this one,’ – that’s what makes me crumble into dust, because I’m like, oh no, I also don’t like it.”
After an album shaped by reconsidering what does and doesn’t deserve her time, I wonder what feels worth spending time on now that The Gem is out in the world. “Probably just really bad art projects that aren’t for public consumption,” she smiles. Jacklin has been journaling since she was about eight years old, and is currently decorating a clunky old treasure chest as an archive for them in her bedroom. “Sticking lots of stuff to it with a glue gun, that’s very important to me right now.”
Julia Jacklin’s ‘The Gem’ is out now on Spotify and Apple Music.
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