Julia Holter releases new single 'Evening Mood'

Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and composer Julia Holter releases her new single “Evening Mood” today ahead of her forthcoming sixth studio album Something in the Room She Moves, out March 22nd on Domino. With “Evening Mood,” Holter had in mind invoking the love hormone oxytocin, with Dev Hoff’s portamento fretless bass lines and Beth Goodfellow’s soft mallet heartbeat-like drums as foundation. Over the heavily-filtered rhythm section, an array of sparkling voices swim: Holter’s gliding vocals, Chris Speed’s soaring birdlike clarinet, and bright Prophet pads by Tashi Wada. The “underwater” production style was informed by a heavy dose of Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo, her daughter’s favourite movie at the time, about a fish that turns into a little girl. “I was inspired by the transformability of creatures, and how this malleability works alongside our capacity for love. I wanted everything to feel very liquid,” she says of the song, which features a “heavily filtered ultrasound heartbeat” sent through a phaser. “I wanted it to sound like it was inside the body.”

Julia Holter - Evening Mood

“Evening Mood” follows the previously released singles “Spinning” and “Sun Girl”. Something in the Room She Moves is available to pre-order on DomMart-edition clear vinyl with a doubled sided poster/lyric sheet and signed photo, as well as indies-edition Calder Red vinyl, LP, CD and digitally. DomMart Digital

Recent years brought about for Julia Holter an existential focus on human connection, amid the staggering change that came with the death of loved ones (including her young nephew, to whom the album is dedicated) and the birth of her daughter. On Something in the Room She Moves, Holter vividly processes the complexity, gravity, and awe of this confluence of experience. She calls the music “sensual,” “flowing,” and “nocturnal”--a testament to how love, with all of its challenges, “reroutes neural pathways.” The cover art by Holter’s childhood friend, artist Christina Quarles, highlights the multiplicity of intimate connection: are the figures embracing or in battle?

The title Something in the Room She Moves came to Holter spontaneously as she was naming the Logic project file for an early demo of what would become the album’s title track on her computer for the first time. Coincidentally, a few months later, she found herself mesmerized by the eight-hour cinéma-vérité Beatles documentary Get Back in 2021. Her titular phrase flips the gaze of the Beatles lyrics (“Something in the way she moves...”); the woman is no longer passively observed, but actively augmenting space. Holter has loved the Beatles since childhood, but sees the title less as a tribute than as a semi-surreal bit of automatic writing from her subconscious. (She had been singing Beatles tunes to her daughter at night.)

After a string of dream pop albums that established her searching voice in independent music—from 2012 breakthrough Ekstasis to Loud City Song and Have You in My Wilderness—Holter released the sprawling and thrillingly experimental Aviary in 2018. Since then, she has scored films like Never Rarely Sometimes Always, performed a commissioned live score for The Passion of Joan of Arc with the Chorus of Opera North, and collaborated with her partner, the musician Tashi Wada, who plays synth and bagpipes on her new album. Something in the Room She Moves is a remarkable progression in Holter’s oeuvre, synthesizing her free, improvisatory energy with her signature eloquence.

Upcoming live shows

• Sunday 7th April – Variations Festival, Nantes
• Tuesday 9th April – EartH Theatre, London
• Wednesday 10th April – Botanique Orangerie, Brussels
• Friday 12th April – Colosseum, Berlin
• Friday 3rd May - El Rey, Los Angeles, CA
• Saturday 4th May - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA
• Monday 6th May – Crocodile, Seattle, WA
• Tuesday 7th May - Aladdin Theater, Portland, OR
• Friday 10th May - Fine Line, Minneapolis, MN
• Saturday 11th May – Outset, Chicago, IL
• Monday 13th May - Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto, ON
• Tuesday 14th May - Le Belmont, Montreal, QC
• 15th May - Brighton Music Hall, Boston, MA
• 17th May - Webster Hall, New York, NY
• 18th May - First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia, PA
• 19th May - The Atlantis, Washington, DC
• Tuesday 21st May - Motorco Music Hall, Durham, NC
• Wednesday 22nd May - Masquerade (Purgatory), Atlanta, GA

Tickets