Julia Jacklin is back with a new album out this August, and it’s a welcome return with critics and fans alike preparing for yet another devastatingly powerful record. PRE PLEASURE set for release on August 26 via Polyvinyl Record Co. 

“I Was Neon” is out today, in what feels like an instant classic. The song is driven by steady guitars and a driving rhythm section, and sonically it’s a rock-pop anthem with Jacklin asking “Am I going to lose myself again?” We might see Jacklin question herself but as always her sharp and intelligent lyrics counter any doubt she may be having. 

Jacklin tells us “I first wrote ‘I was neon’ for a band called rattlesnack, a short-lived much loved 2019 side project that I played drums in. I rewrote it for my album in Montreal, during a time when I was desperately longing for a version of myself that I feared was gone forever. I was thinking of this song when I made the album cover, this song is the album cover really.”  

The binary of casual crisis is a powerful force in Julia Jacklin’s music. Since releasing her debut album Don’t Let the Kids Win in 2016, the Melbourne-via-Blue Mountains singer/songwriter has carved out a fearsome reputation as a direct lyricist, willing to excavate the parameters of intimacy and agency in songs both stark and raw, loose, and playful. If her folky 2016 debut Don’t Let the Kids Win announced those intentions, and the startling 2018 follow-up Crushing drew in listeners uncomfortably close, PRE PLEASURE is the sound of Jacklin gently loosening her grip.Conceived upon returning home at the end of a mammoth Crushing world tour, and finished in a frantic few months of recording in Montreal (“The songs on this record took either three years to write or three minutes”), PRE PLEASURE sees Jacklin expanding beyond her signature sound, while conjuring the ripples and faultlines caused by unreliable communication.

Photo Courtesy: Nick Mckk