Julia Holter – Materia
Today, Julia Holter, one of contemporary music’s most distinctive composers and songwriters, announces Materia, a seven-track companion album to her acclaimed 2024 release Something in the Room She Moves.
The collection, a sequel of sorts, includes new songs written and recorded with her band in between tours, reinventions of Something’s “Materia,” and songs first conceived around the making of the 2024 record.
Alongside today’s announcement, Holter shares new single “Fantasy,” one of the most immediate and luminous tracks on Materia.
“May the daydream flood my mind,” she sings, summoning new pathways with a mix of anticipation and trepidation. The track unfolds like a waking dream, with Holter’s voice guiding its gradual expansion as the arrangement blooms around her.
The accompanying video, directed by Dicky Bahto in collaboration with Holter, features Holter herself amid a series of fleeting, dreamlike clips–arms reaching through the frame, gestures of movement and connection inspired by monastic sign language, the appearance of a beloved cat.
Reflecting on “Fantasy,” Holter shares: “This song of seeming willful abandon was somehow the most laborious undertaking of the entire record—it took over a year and went through various transformations—and I love that contradiction. It’s dancey, it feels to me like a kind of conjuring. And amidst the momentum of reverie, there’s the line “blink at the light and hope to survive,” because daydreams in a fascist state can be scary too. I was trying to find the right sanguine tempo.”
Something in the Room She Moves was met with widespread acclaim upon its release in 2024, establishing the sonic and thematic world that Materia now expands upon. Critics praised its warmth, emotional depth, and expansive sonic palette; Pitchfork described it as an album where “Holter’s filmic vision has never sounded more diffuse,” while Bandcamp Daily called it “an album bursting with musicality–lush, and full of affirmation, soothing and challenging at the same time.” Paste hailed its “swirling odyssey of sweeping sound and emotion,” and The FADER deemed it “Holter’s warmest, most expansive work yet,” later naming it the 35th Best Album of 2024. The record’s reflections on motherhood, grief, and transformation resonated widely, with AllMusic noting that “Holter excels at translating the joy, fear, and exhaustion of creating and caring for a new life into powerfully expressionist music,” while Exclaim! praised it as “some of the most beautiful work of Holter’s career thus far.” The album’s lead single “Spinning” was also recognized by Pitchfork as one of the year’s best tracks, landing at No. 42 on its list of the 100 Best Songs of 2024.
Julia Holter always knew there were multiple forms her song “Materia” could take. The tune’s dynamic, Hildegard von Bingen-inspired melody and dense modal chords stood on their own without a complex arrangement on her wondrous 2024 album Something in the Room She Moves, but she felt a lingering desire to expand the texture and stretch out the harmony. Though she could hear the potential orchestration in her head, Something was already abundant with layers of sound by the time she finished it. She stuck with the original form of “Materia,” then, her cresting voice and blue Wurlitzer hosting games of harmonic hide-and-seek above subtle electronics.
But on the new Materia, a kind of companion LP or sequel to Something, Holter has realized not one but two distinct versions of the song. “Materia 2” is a hallucinatory dream of drum machine, fretless bass, and clarinet, Holter’s voice spiraling through the ether alongside that of Jessika Kenney. She reconsiders the lyrics, too, novel fragments of surrealistic images reinforcing the original’s link between spirit and body, between love and blood. And on “Materia 3,” Holter literally slows down the take from Something. (It’s intended to be experienced as a “bonus track” in an homage to the CD era of her youth.) The change not only emphasizes the unpredictable glory of the harmonies within but also reiterates the song’s emotional sophistication, the sense that it’s about learning how to live.
Materia is only seven tracks long, but Holter works in nearly that many modes here. There is the slowed “Materia” and the version reimagined for two voices, of course, but there are also two tracks that spooled out of the DAW project files and full band she built for Something. There are two astounding improvisations: one where she manipulates her voice so that each word seems to contain a symphony and another that is one of Materia’s most spellbinding and emotional pieces, “My Twin,” from which Holter lifted a riff to build the song “Fantasy.” These seven songs show that Holter is among her generation’s most open writers of art-pop, moving among ideas and idioms with exploratory aplomb. Materia is a kind of playground for Holter, where each distinct scene steadily coheres into a moving whole.
Keen observers will recognize “The Laugh Is in the Eyes,” released as a single in 2024 as Holter toured Something. Indeed, the band from that record—Elizabeth Goodfellow (drums), Devra Hoff (fretless bass), Maia (flute), Chris Speed (saxophone and clarinet), Tashi Wada (synthesizers), and Kenny Gilmore (co-production, engineering, mixing)—reappears here, as does Holter’s sumptuous imagery: mountains in blue skies, bunches of wildflowers, flutes at play. “I need to learn to make the sweetness stay,” Holter sings over a fascinating rhythm that always seems on the verge of tumbling over itself. That romantic glow also courses through “Fantasy,” one of the most compulsive and engrossing songs Holter has ever recorded. For two minutes, she seems to stare from a window, daydreaming about all the goodness that can be. And in the chorus, she is ushered forward by Goodfellow’s drums taking over where the drum machine left, the rhythms and the textures bursting all around like summertime fireworks. But this dream that seems to arrive is yet framed by a grounding uncertainty: “Blink at the light and hope to survive.”
Though Holter has collaborated with many exceptional musicians in the last 15 years, solo work has always been key to her process, including unfettered improvisations where she builds melodies and harmonies in real time. Two of them are absolute highlights here. Taking its name from ancient water clocks, “Clepsydra” considers the absurdity of time, the way our need to quantify something that simply exists can make prisoners of us all. Aside from rewritten lyrics, it is heard here as she originally recorded it; the processed vocals reiterate how alien the concept of time can be and turn it into a sort of otherworldly love story. And though the 10-minute masterpiece “My Twin” was improvised by Holter alone, mostly in one take, it is a brilliant consideration of forking paths and multiplicity. Holter is in dialogue with another version of herself, considering the pleasure and pain into which we simply seem to stumble. Holter became a mother and lost a nephew while writing Something and many songs on Materia, and the imperialistic and violent behavior of her country have left her, along with so many others, shaken; this song is a reminder that gratitude is precarious but beautiful, and that presence is necessary.
There has always been a welcome fluidity to Holter’s work. On those earliest records, it was the way the sound seemed to bubble up from beneath a cloudy surface. On subsequent records, she would play with song forms, performing multiple versions on the same LP, as she has now done again across Something and Materia. And there’s the way her songs have always flowed into unexpected paths, curving left when you might have expected a straight line. Materia is the most compelling and concise expression yet of this fluidity—as a composer, as a singer, as a person who experiences, feels, and wonders. At one point, what became Something in the Room She Moves was titled Materia, a name Holter once worried might sound too serious; there was always something more to it, though, and here it is.
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