Julia Holter blurs the boundaries between indie music, modern composition, and electronic music with free-flowing eloquence. On early releases such as 2011's Tragedy, the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter and composer combined bedroom recordings of droning electronics and distant vocals with inspirations as cultured as Euripides' play Hippolytus. She explored different perspectives on every album, incorporating chamber pop and the words of Virginia Woolf and Frank O'Hara on 2012's Ekstasis and reimagining Gigi -- both Colette's short story and Vincente Minelli's 1958 film -- on 2013's bustling Loud City Song. Holter used traditional pop structures skillfully on 2015's acclaimed Have You in My Wilderness, but 2018's ambitious double-album Aviary and 2024's flowing, intuitive Something in the Room She Moves underscored just how vital experimentation was to her expression. Born in Milwaukee and raised in Los Angeles by a musically inclined family -- her father is a guitarist who once played with Pete Seeger -- Holter began playing piano at an early age and started writing her own music at age ten. Along with her classical training, Holter also learned to play songs by Billie Holiday, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and Radiohead. While studying composition at the University of Michigan, she began recording her own music. In 2007, she released a pair of self-recorded works, Eating the Stars and Phaedra Runs to Russia. After graduation, she studied electronic music at CalArts with Michael Pisaro, who she was inspired to work with after seeing him perform during her time at U of M. In 2008, she contributed tracks to Monika's 4 Women No Cry, Vol. 3 as well as a Human Ear compilation, and released the CD-R album Cookbook on Sleepy Mammal Sound. The following year, Holter began working with the Dublab collective and appeared on a volume of their In the Loop series of vinyl compilations. The fruits of another one of her projects, phonetically translating songs performed in languages other than English, were on display on 2010's "Why Sad Song," her interpretation of a Burmese lament that appeared on the Beaterblocker #2 collection (which also featured tracks by Keith Fullerton Whitman and Eluvium). That year, Holter also released the CD-R Celebration on Engraved Glass Records, a collection of live recordings on NNA Tapes and performed with the Linda Perhacs Band. All of this activity was just a warm-up for her first full-fledged album, 2011's Tragedy, which was released by Leaving Records. Inspired by Euripides' play Hippolytus, the album melded tweaked electronics with classical and pop elements, earning critical acclaim from avant and underground music publications both online and in print. Soon after Tragedy's release came Ekstasis, a lighter and more accessible but still complex song cycle that arrived in March 2012. The album marked her chart debut, reaching number 49 on Billboard's Heatseekers Albums chart in the U.S. On top of her busy music schedule, she also found time to tutor teenagers in South Central L.A. as part of a nonprofit organization. Her third album, Loud City Song, was inspired by Colette's 1944 novella Gigi (and Vincente Minelli's 1958 film) and arrived in August 2013. Building on Ekstasis' acclaim, Loud City Song peaked at 19 on the Heatseekers Albums chart and became her first release to chart in Europe and the U.K., where it landed at 103 on the Official Albums Chart. On September 2015's Have You in My Wilderness, she took a more intimate, accessible approach that put her vocals front and center. Inspired by the writings of Christopher Isherwood and Colette, the album hit number three on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart and 29 on the U.K.'s Official Albums Chart. Collaborations with Ducktails and Jean-Michel Jarre preceded 2016's Bleed for This, the score to Ben Younger's film about boxer Vinny Pazienza. Early the next year, In the Same Room inaugurated a series of albums from Domino that featured the label's artists re-creating their definitive songs live in a London studio. In September 2017, Holter premiered her score to Carl Theodor Dryer's classic 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc at Los Angeles' FIGat7th. The following October, she released her fifth album Aviary, an exploration of memory featuring contributions from Cole M.G.N., Kenny Gilmore, and Tashi Wada and sources of inspiration including Vangelis' Blade Runner score, medieval music, and Alice Coltrane. The expansive double album reached 16 on the Heatseekers Albums chart in the U.S. and 73 on the U.K. Albums Chart. Holter then spent time scoring the 2019 British TV show Pure as well as the documentary In My Own Time: A Portrait of Karen Dalton and the film Never Rarely Sometimes Always (both from 2020). That year, she issued her 2012 cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Gold Dust Woman" and her 2018 Adult Swim single "So Humble the Afternoon" on vinyl. In 2021, Holter was a visiting assistant professor and the Johnston-Fix Professor of the Practice in Songwriting at Los Angeles' Occidental College. Two years later, she collaborated with composer Alex Temple and the Spektral Quartet on Behind the Wallpaper. She returned with her sixth full-length, Something in the Room She Moves, in March 2024. Drawing from her experiences as a new mother, the death of her nephew, the Studio Ghibli film Ponyo, and creativity itself, the album fused ambient pop, jazz, and minimalist composition in its flowing pieces. ~ Heather Phares, Rovi

Stuff You Should Know

Julia Holter

Going to Stuff You Should Know?