Ears Wide Open: Julia, Julia

Ilana Tel-Oren on July 19th, 2022

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Singer-songwriter Julia Kugel goes solo in her new project Julia, Julia, shifting her focus from her involvement in the punk band the Coathangers and dream-pop duo Soft Palms to music that reflects her inner journey of healing. With her new moniker and mission to embark on a path of personal growth and self-acceptance in hand, Julia, Julia has been busy in her home studio, COMA, in Long Beach creating her debut solo LP, “Derealization,” out Sept. 30 via Suicide Squeeze Records. Here, she asks, in a broad sense, “If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?”

Julia, Julia brings the beguiling sounds of atmospheric pop, ethereal folk and, perhaps, country ballads to the project, on which she plays almost all the instruments and engineers. “Honestly, I kinda lost it,” she says of what she confronted during the pandemic: losing her voice. “Through making this record I made peace with it and reconciled myself as a real person.

“You know how touring musicians often speak of whether home is real or tour is real? Well, it can lead you to lose grasp on ‘reality,’ especially when touring is taken away and you are left to wonder if anything was ever real, including yourself. Like you we’re just playing a character.”

The dreamy, atmospheric lead-single “Fever In My Heart” arrived last week with an experimental visual directed by Lauryn Alvarez and Kugel herself. The song features pulsing, echoing percussion and ethereal, whispering vocals and prominent piano. In the video, Kugel’s talking head moves statically and multiplies, growing in movement as the song swells in climax.

“This song is about losing yourself, losing your mind and liking it. In some weird way it felt magical to feel completely out of place in reality. I felt like I had heightened senses, like I could feel a rising vibration in my heart. Everything was falling apart but I liked it. I felt alive. I had seen a glimpse of my true self and I knew her right away. I saw a reflection that wasn’t distorted for once, and I wanted to follow it through the looking glass to the other side where I could feel totally at peace. I hadn’t known that was possible before,” Kugel says. “Layers and layers of vocals convey the confusion and ecstasy of madness. I call this my acoustic techno song, since it has a dance aesthetic at its core, but the production is humble and mostly unplugged.”

||| Watch: The video for “Fever in My Heart”