The whirring engine beneath Julia Jacklin’s warm, rangy rock songs has often been anxiety. Her characters are usually found muttering in corners, working themselves up to something big or tearing themselves apart over something small. “I don’t know how to keep loving you, now that I know you so well,” she sang over and over again on her 2019 breakout Crushing, alternating emphases—“I don’t know how to keep loving you,” “I don’t know how to keep loving you”—until the weight became asphyxiating. On her 2022 album Pre Pleasure, she admitted “I’ve been trying to be turned on by you/Be turned on by myself, or anything else” on one song before giving herself a touching pep talk in another: “I’ll feel adored tonight/Ignore intrusive thoughts tonight.”
On her new album, The Gem, she’s still reciting nervous mantras: “Get away from me, I think I’ll love you soon,” she sings on a song of the same name. Her best songs—and over the course of four studio albums, she’s written many great ones— chew away at a single thought until it turns gristly, and that thought usually pits the mind against the heart: “The hardest thing to do is to believe it when I say I love you/The hardest thing to do is to stick around trying to convince you,” goes the chorus to “The Hardest Thing.” She still favors loose, sprawling arrangements, which offer a welcome cushion against her sharp, blood-drawing insights. Being inside her head still feels like witnessing a family argument, while the songs still feel soft enough for you to hide beneath.
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But if you listen close to The Gem you will hear the sound of some things changing for Jacklin. Or, maybe more accurately, you hear Jacklin surrendering herself to the idea of change. “God” appears twice in the track list, and the word “Angel” also makes an appearance, too. For Jacklin, these divine signifiers feel like synonyms for whatever force might be strong enough to dislodge someone from an obsessive rut. “You have to be a God sometimes/Force the moment to change,” she sings on “God, Sometimes,” against a gently psychedelic two-chord romp. It’s a poetic reframing of a simple command: Snap out of it.
Over the weary bar-band groove “If I Had the Hand of God,” which evokes Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, Jacklin’s still trying to snap out of it. The unknowable Almighty, here, is just another metaphor for all those things you just can’t make yourself do. If she had the hand of god, Jacklin would “take a breath and call my dad.” She’d know to respond to a loved one when they’re struggling instead of watching helplessly. She’d have the grace to look around at her career and know, in her gut, when it was time to call it quits. It’s a given, of course, that she doesn’t, or doesn’t know how to, do any of this. The song begins and ends with the poignant image of Jacklin “standing in the yard trying not to drink/Looking at my neighbor eat a peach over the sink.” She’s never framed herself quite this way in her lyrics before: filmed at a remove, marooned amidst a greater landscape.
