According to its promotional text, “Materia” draws on Julia Holter’s desire to continue exploring the possibilities of the self-titled track that appeared on her 2024 release, “Something In The Room She Moves.” As a starting premise for a new album, it may seem somewhat odd, because aside from two new versions (“Materia 2” and “Materia 3”), the rest of the songs are simply new material that apparently bears no relation to the original composition.
Furthermore, “Materia 3” (which closes the album) is, in fact, a “metamusical act” more than a new piece: it is simply the original recording from the previous album but slowed down. According to Julia, this is to “accentuate the unpredictable glory of the harmonies it contains and reiterate the emotional sophistication of the song.” She adds that it is intended to be experienced almost as a “bonus track,” in the manner of CDs from her youth.
So “Materia 2” is really the only track that generates genuinely new music from the original, in which the artist has indeed been able to fulfill her wish to “expand the texture and extend the harmony” of the earlier piece. The point is that, moreover, the seed of some of the other tracks on the album also came from ideas she developed during the recording of “Something …”
All of this explains Holter’s desire to link this album to its predecessor, as a complementary work or a continuation. Logical, perhaps, but it may also give “Materia” a certain aura of a lesser or subordinate work, especially since it is also the shortest album of her career.
And that would be unfair, because the 35 minutes of “Materia” are splendid. For those of us who consider her version of Barbara Lewis’s “Hello Stranger” to be the Rosetta Stone that connects Holter’s experimental side with a pop tradition dating back to the early 1960s Brill Building hitmakers in New York, anything that brings her closer to that perfect center between those two worlds will win us over (especially after two precious albums that were somewhat distant from what “Have You In My Wilderness” promised a decade ago). That is why it is so gratifying to see that most of this new record recaptures that approach brilliantly.
“The Laugh Is In Her Eyes” opens the album ambitiously: atop an experimental five-beat bar that carries you on unpredictable rhythmic flights, there rests a marvel of mutant pop in Holter’s style, with melodies that become more irresistible with every listen. Especially in the chorus, they are enveloped by celestial synth pads, with gorgeous fretless-bass accompaniment and clarinets.
The balance between experimentation and tradition is also reflected in the lyrics: for every line of surreal automatic writing or phonetics (“If I take my own swing (Ah!), felt so delicately / The weeping from my eyes (Ah! ah!)”), there is a coherent chorus that poetically reflects the joy the piece conveys musically (“We laughed all night / Flutes play, true delight / I need to learn to make the sweetness stay”).
“My Lost One” is a prodigy: over delicious and mysterious music-box-like arpeggios, somewhat witchy, Julia sings about a tree that grows through the door, and about wishing for peace but also for darkness. In this fairy-tale-like, slightly sinister context, the beautiful song contains a powerful echo of the long-missed art-folk melodies of Trish Keenan.
And as is habitual with Holter, everything is capped by nontraditional musical forms and — for example — an improvised final chorus that restates the opening verse melody. The closing chorus culminates in an art-pop flourish that speeds up and accelerates until it swallows itself—a striking, not-easy-feat to pull off. “My Lost One” is one of the year’s best (and most distinct) pop songs.
Of course, throughout “Materia” there is that exquisite attention to detail, whether in arrangement (the smallest keyboard or percussion touches perfectly woven) or sonics (the care given to textures—and especially reverbs—at a level almost like sound design).
“My Fantasy” completes the first half of the album’s pop-glory: verses with a drum machine, a vocal melody that nods to bossa nova (almost as if Astrud Gilberto accompanied arty experiments on Suzanne Ciani’s synthesizer), and a round, uptempo, very pop chorus (repeated just once) about a mysterious fantasy Julia has not managed to realize (“I can see you from the water / My head heavy sinking feelings (…) I missed my fantasy / It’s my fantasy I want now”).
“Materia 2” serves as a transition between that first, more art-pop half and the album’s somewhat more experimental conclusion: as noted, the piece is an exploration of the original melody of “Materia,” but with new sections. The reverbs create exquisite atmospheres, similar to the sounds Holter has been building for years, but as a particularly elegant refinement. Instrumentally, it abounds in that blend that works so well throughout the album (drum machine, synths, fretless bass, wind instruments), and which is very characteristic of a late-80s New Age school, though it personally reminds me most of the nearly forgotten Virginia Astley.
That transition leads us to “Clepsydra,” a piece essentially vocal, with a captivating study of harmonies and electronic treatment of the voices, in which each syllable sung seems to contain a symphony of its own. It is followed by “My Twin,” a ten-minute suite that interweaves various pieces and more experimental atmospheres. But, as is typical for the artist, even her most exploratory forays into the unconventional contain textures, tonalities (instrumental and vocal) and even reverbs that are always euphonious, never abrasive, ensuring total sensory enjoyment.
Thus, the shift from fragment to fragment in the suite is continually stimulating, until the arrival of its centerpiece: a surprise in the form of a pure ambient-pop ballad, melodically once again bearing that unmistakable Brill Building touch. The perfect embodiment of a Bacharach or a King floating in the cosmos.
The suite ends with a minute of musique concrète in the form of experiments with magnetic tape and background noise, and it leads us to that final “bonus track” described at the outset, in which Julia manipulates the original 2024 recording of “Materia” by slowing it down roughly 115%.
In the song “Fantasy,” Holter sings, “Don’t press mute, just let the noises shine / May the daydream flood my mind.” Those lines seem a fitting summary of what this album holds. The “noises” actually glow, because Julia’s music is especially synesthetic. And that wonderful lucid dream that these seven pieces ultimately flood into your mind does so in a coherently arranged sequence that, in my view—even with its apparent role as a complementary record—marks another step forward in crowning the artist as the queen of contemporary experimental pop.
