Julia Jacklin’s PRE PLEASURE Dances Through a Millennial Anxiety Dream

Julia Jacklin’s new album draws to a close with a plea: “Be careful with yourself,” she sings in the song of the same name. She begs someone to “please stop smoking” because she “want[s] your life to last a long time,” and later advises them to “make sure you have got a little savings” and “keep all our doctors appointments, give voice to our doubts.”

As an early 30-something, the Australian singer is now, like so many millennials, faced with the realities of adulthood. “There’s nobody coming to save us,” she eventually sighs in the penultimate song of her third LP, PRE PLEASURE. While Jacklin is probably singing from the perspective of a worried friend or partner, “Be Careful With Yourself” is one of a few songs on the album that contain what sounds like advice from a concerned parent. And when her lyrics don’t lean towards the maternal, Jacklin is a sharp observer of her own internal life, hacking away at the crust of her neuroses and conditions—be they intrusive thoughts or caring too much—until some nugget of meaning is unearthed. For Jacklin, this involves a combination of revisiting childhood and confronting adulthood, a process that results in some of the Australian artist’s sharpest songwriting to date.

If Jacklin’s stellar 2019 sophomore LP Crushing was an album of breakup ballads and single-girl musings, then PRE PLEASURE is about what comes after—what it takes to keep everything together. Jacklin nods at the unraveling detailed on Crushing in the energetic PRE PLEASURE single “I Was Neon,” in which she revels a bit in enjoying the person she’s become in the aftermath, only to anxiously ask, “Am I gonna lose myself again?” The song is a testament to not only Jacklin’s personal growth, but also her evolution as an artist. Full, crunchy guitars, an ace melody, and rich and creamy vocals all contribute to Jacklin’s signature polished indie-rock sound that seemingly gets better with each album. Fellow single and album opener “Lydia Wears a Cross,” too, floats across new sonic ground, melding drum machines with piano while Jacklin successfully tries her hand at unpacking religious disquiet.

While the melodies are delivered with ease, Jacklin is grappling with some serious predicaments throughout PRE PLEASURE, namely her struggle to communicate with loved ones, especially family. In the regretful “Less of a Stranger,” Jacklin charts a mother-daughter relationship that continually falls short. “You’re never gonna see me through the same eyes my friends do,” she sings in a stream-of-consciousness style, adding, “I just wish my own mother was less of a stranger.” And then on “Moviegoer,” which pokes fun at film bros who “[love] to throw their film knowledge around the workplace,” she switches gears to attack the issue of communication again: “If you can say it to a stranger, you can call your sister later,” she reasons.