Julia Holter: 'Something in the Room She Moves' Album Review

Something in the Room She Moves Makes Julia Holter Tactile Once More

It’s still kind of a running joke in my family, how deathly serious I was about Peter Jackson’s Beatles docuseries Get Back first coming out. At my parents’ home for the long Thanksgiving weekend, I told my brother he was welcome to watch with me—on the condition that we had to get through all six episodes during that first weekend, and with the warning that I would forge ahead without him if he wasn’t there to keep up. Like most self-appointed music historians, I regarded the release of this footage with the care I would take to handle something that had been waiting for me my entire life—because it felt like it had been. Having seen the original 1970 Let it Be documentary, made from a selection of the same footage, I went in expecting an extension of that film: a document of immediate and painful emotional collapse. Of course, I was proven wrong, bearing witness to the tiny joys and sorrows—menial, nothing interactions—that exist between people who share a deep love they know is being strained by their own diverging paths, especially after surviving an earth-shattering experience together.

Yes, I was enthralled by both the monotony and the ingenuity of the band’s creative process, but I treasured the “downtime” Jackson picked out and pieced together even more. In these scenes, I witnessed the things that made me want to write about people in the first place: the nuances and physicality of growing with people you love. Even when you’re capturing footage of a divine blast of light, it will be the smallest touch or comment that displaces weight. With bonds solid enough, you can feel the room tangibly shift.

When Los Angeles musician Julia Holter released her ninth solo album, Aviary, in 2018, it felt like its own divine blast of light—something we should never expect to see duplicated by this artist or any other. Building upon the critically-beloved chamber pop of 2013’s Loud City Song and 2015’s Have You In My Wilderness, it arrived as a dense, grandiose avant-pop statement whose abstractions made it an increasingly rewarding album to return to in subsequent years. When Holter and a wall of choral voices proclaim “I shall love” like a monastic chant in the first part of the song of the same name, it felt more like a demand from a deity than a confession from an earthbound songwriter. “That is all, that is all,” Holter says at the opening of the more conventional “I Shall Love 2.” “There is nothing else.” In the surrealistic world Aviary builds, love is not so much a partnership but the claiming of territory or an impenetrable force blocking you out. As some other famous songwriting pair put it, “Love is all, love is you”—and here, it devours everything in its path.

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When Holter sings, “Love can be shattering” on the penultimate track of Something in the Room She Moves—her first solo studio album since Aviary—that love is just as all-consuming. It doesn’t even feel like a statement of defeat, but the sound of someone who has been bulldozed by the towering wall of love she’d erected before. It’s like she’s contending with being pliable, or even human, again. As thrilling as Aviary’s intricacies could be, there is something just as thrilling in hearing Julia Holter make herself flesh and blood again. Her artistry can take all of these forms, and this is why she is simply one of the most interesting musicians working today.

Following a lengthy period where all Holter could focus on was the physical—having become pregnant in the early stages of pandemic and having her daughter, while also dealing with the grief of losing her nephew—Something in the Room She Moves seems to have emerged from a state of heightened awareness towards what it means to have a body and use it to interact with the bodies of others. There’s a clear link to the Beatles’ song “Something” in the title (Holter spontaneously decided to save early Logic demos under the name, prior to her own love affair with Get Back upon its release), but instead of simply communicating a person’s essence, the phrase has a distinct sense of location. Like in the docuseries, the album works as a depiction of the space between people who are connected by their love for each other: the fallibility of each party, how to deal with the tangible loss once that other person no longer takes up space.

Perhaps the most striking element of Something in the Room She Moves is its attention to pacing—its willingness to wade in and out of the insistent rushes and retreats of emotion that come with loving another person. The album revels in its most maximalist art pop leanings with first two singles “Sun Girl” and “Spinning”, the former of which opens the album. Notably, both seem to revel in the miracle of the senses, as if Holter is attempting to translate her daughter’s perspective in discovering the world for the first time. “Sun Girl” basks in the nursery rhyme circularity of its chorus (“My dreams as I dream in golden yellow”) before letting the rhythm wind itself down to let glistening synth lines and straining blasts of woodwind instruments blossom in its absence. Meanwhile, the concussive pulse of “Spinning” feels similarly shocked into motion, seeming to depict the fear and wonder of the unknown: “What is delicious? / And what is omniscient? / And what is the circular magic I’m visiting?” Arriving at the halfway point of the album, it counters the openness of “Sun Girl” with the distress that might come with understanding how a body works, repeating, “I’m in the way, the tears are mine,” with an increasing sense of urgency. In their gorgeous fracturedness, these two songs in particular act as bold statements which anchor the remainder of the album.

Though the rest of the tracklist certainly doesn’t err from Holter’s more experimental impulses, these songs are surrounded by meditative moments that act as a salve following a shove. The title track—a brooding slow burn that builds upon wiley saxophone and clarinet lines to a panoramic crescendo—allows itself to expand but not overwhelm before segueing into “Materia,” which is almost entirely built around Holter’s elastic voice and an electric piano. Where other tracks aim to mimic sensory overload, these moments force your attention to the barest elements.

This is only taken to a further extreme with the following song “Meyou,” whose lyrics only consist of the words “me” and “you” stretched and distorted to the point where they don’t feel like your brain can assign meaning to them any longer. About halfway through, one of the myriad voices in the starkest arrangement on the record sounds as if it is straining to get the word “you” out from behind clenched teeth, allowing the rest of the voices to become more unruly as the piece continues. They become unintelligible and almost glitchy before climaxing, where the higher register singers reach the top of their range and yelp, sounding like a string has snapped. The track then quietly dissipates into the brighter jolt of “Spinning.” The most impressive feat is the fluidity with which Holter works within these disparate modes, synthesizing these major life themes—the grief, the joy, the unfamiliarity, the need to fill empty space—into a project that still pushes the boundaries of her artistry. If anything, it feels more lived-in, more comfortable even as the record takes its biggest swings.

Though major pop divas are hardly Holter’s contemporaries in terms of the sonic world they work in, it’s worth considering the current mainstream music obsession with “wellness”—face-value lyrics about healing, “radical” self-care and therapy-adjacent buzzwords that have come to mean nothing through social media bastardization. In the past month, we’ve seen more songs on the Billboard charts which sneak in lyrics about codependency than we probably ever assumed possible. Reserving my own judgment on how those records stack up to the rest of their respective artists’ catalogs, we seem to have hit a collective wall in terms of how we can make these topics genuinely moving or revelatory for listeners.

In contrast, Something in the Room She Moves also tackles this weighty task of processing difficult life changes while juggling them with gratitude for new beginnings, but does it in a manner that mirrors how these conflicts really feel, creating something evocative and challenging even in its more muted turns. Holter could hardly have been called a “confessional” songwriter at any point in her career—especially given how her lyrics seem more focused on the stretch of vowels and the emotive nature of enunciation than forming complete sentences—but what she is able to put across in the selective sounds she lands on is consistently impactful.

A lyric like “Am I listening? / I was not alone / Thinking how could I wrap / My arms all round / My face, my face / My girl, my girl”, sung alongside a recording of her daughter’s ultrasound in “Evening Mood”, comes across more vividly than any lyric explicitly listing out coping mechanisms could. Julia Holter knows you understand what it’s like to love someone without having to be spoon fed her meaning. She knows you’re a person who’s lived through it—maybe even a person who’s paid attention to how the room shifts when that someone enters or leaves.

From the sustained discomfort captured in a ringing bassline on “Talking to the Whisper” to soft waves of ambient synth soundscapes on instrumental track “Ocean,” every choice on Something in the Room She Moves feels effortless. It exposes a side of Julia Holter that trades in ornate grandiosity for fluidity that can shift the room with even the smallest touch—sharing in our tiny joys and sorrows as she orchestrates unruly sound to blossom before retreating. It’s the sound of four childhood friends moving in a room too small for who they’ve become just as much as it’s the sound of an artist experiencing light through a child’s eyes, stretching the singularity of one woman’s experience into something we can all hold onto. Maybe, if it catches you at the right time, that something could push back.

Read our recent profile on Julia Holter here.

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.

Something in the Room She Moves Makes Julia Holter Tactile Once More

The LA musician's latest processes difficult life changes while juggling them with gratitude for new beginnings, but does so in a manner that mirrors how these conflicts really feel, creating something evocative and challenging even in its more muted turns.