Alt-R&B artists Juletta + Ishan has dropped their latest single “Solstice,” a shimmering second single from their newly announced collaborative album If I Never Hit Land, out October 16. Inspired by real stories Juletta collected from 30 women she interviewed over the past two years in New York City, she explains: “I wrote ‘Solstice’ about a woman named Jenny whom I met on the day of the summer solstice in 2018. She had watched her brother, her mother and her father pass away. Her favorite poem was ‘On turning Ten’ by Billy Collins, which inspired the lyric: “You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one”. Juletta’s ethereal vocals blend with Ishan’s impeccably arranged electronics to create a balancing act entirely their own. “I often play a mix of house and classic disco, and the influence of both can be felt in the composition,” Ishan explains.

This follows the meditative first single “But Judi, Everything Changes.” As Ishan explains the duo’s dynamic: “Working with Juletta was like letting me loose on a playground. It allowed me to grapple with ideas that possessed my mind as a producer, but had never fully had the chance to express — the balance between organic and synthetic, having an experience that’s both intimate and expansive.”
 
Raised in California before moving to Italy and then New York, Juletta met producer and DJ Ishan in 2018, when they released a folk-pop EP Wild Nature plus a string of singles under Juletta’s name. As they continued to work together, their sound expanded to incorporate elements of hip hop, deep house, and electronic music. 
 
Produced and written entirely by the pair, If I Never Hit Land marries Ishan’s driving, house-influenced production with Juletta’s introspective songwriting. As Juletta says: “This album is my account and my experience of the memories, the tears shed, the echoing thoughts and the complexities from 30 interviews with women from the city. And within those stories is a story of my own.”