PRE-ORDER: Julia Holter "Materia" LP

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. 

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.