Hi, everyone. Timethony Linetano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of this new Julia Holter project, Materia.

Yes, newest full-length album from singer-songwriter-composer Miss Julia Holter. In my opinion, one of the most unique artists to make a name for herself on the indie circuit in the past ten-plus years.

In fact, last year was the ten-year anniversary of my favorite record in her catalogue, Have You in the My Wilderness, an album that at least for me, really helped put her on the map and define her trademark brand of pop, which is a surreal, dreamy, super nuanced approach to the genre, painted with enchanting keys and reeds, ambient atmospheres, and progressive song structures.

In its best moments, it sounds like living in a cloud city, sleeping in a cloud bed, eating breakfast with your cloud wife, and driving your cloud car to cloud work at the cloud factory.

While pop is very clearly a cornerstone to Miss Holter's work, it's really how she abstracts and subverts this style of music and the ideas in it that is often the point, which she has discovered more and more ways to do on subsequent records, occasionally going even a little too far for my taste, like on 2018's Aviary. But still, this record was an impressive achievement in her catalogue, the sheer scope of this 90-minute epic that features everything from chamber instrumentation to jazz to free improvisation.

It's really a wild trip of an album, but personally, I preferred, just slightly more, her 2024 record, Something in the Room She Moves, which had a much more measured overall presentation and runtime, too. To me, it was loaded with a lot of adventurous highlights and just a lot of ideas that were familiar from Aviary. But condensed down to the most memorable and impactful moments.

And apparently Julia felt pretty strongly about the material on this album as well, because her latest here, Materia, is a kind of sequel or sister album in a way. I mean, for one, this project is titled after a song from Something in the Room, and has two tracks in its tracklist built off of Materia's original vision.

"Materia 2," as well as the closer "Materia 3," which I guess, spiritually speaking, Julia envisioned as almost like a bonus track that would come after maybe like a long pause of silence at the end of a CD album. Though its literal placement on streaming platforms is not too far off of that mark, considering it comes right after the massive 10-minute track, "My Twin".

So yeah, I guess going into this record, know that it is intended to be some kind of extended experience, that it is intended to be some kind of extended experience from Julia's last record. Music and ideas that were possibly holdovers from that time period. Amnesiac to, Radiohead's Kid A, in a sort of way. Not the most exciting concept out there, but still, for an artist of Julia's caliber, could still be a great thing.

Especially considering that her songs and arrangements are often so impressionist and textural that I imagine there's an almost infinite way to interpret them all sorts of ways, so long as they end up landing in an abstract territory somewhere. So to the direction this album is going in, I say, why not? And the initial teasers from this thing, of which there were many, like four of this record's seven tracks, were released to the public before the whole thing dropped.

But still, with these teasers, the textures were certainly there, the modes and moods that I would typically come to expect from an album in this leg of Julia Holter's career. But upon further inspection, something kind of feels amiss, as I don't think Materia really comes together as a cohesive, thoughtful, and moving, enchanting, evocative album.

I mean, the opening track, for example, features a lot of meandering progressions, and the ending, which maybe I thought could segue into something else really quickly, come together with other tracks on the record, the following track specifically, in a way that feels holistic. The abrupt finish of this one just comes across as a rug pull and as if Julia and her collaborators just didn't really know how to end it.

Then "My Lost One", which, yes, does feature a lot of familiar textures, from the keys to the heavy use of reverb to Julia's whisper-quiet vocal harmonies. The fretless bass, too. I think the start of it is pretty strong and alluring, but as it moves on, we get hit with some bass and vocal passages, which frankly are kind of what's called the fretless bass and vocal passages, which frankly are kind of grating and lack the finesse of the best material from Julia's past two projects.

Not only that, but the way the song kind of reaches an intense peak with this progressively increasing speed and tempo. It's a cool idea and concept, but is executed in the sloppiest and most unfulfilling way. And culminates in an ending that feels like it just kind of peters out because it has nowhere else to go.

Then "Materia 2," unfortunately, doesn't really hold a candle to the original track at all. The two-minute "Clepsydra" is fine while it's on, but there's so little meat on the bone of this track, it feels almost pointless to include.

And then after that, you have the biggest track on the record, "My Twin", a song that I did have a lot of high hopes for, given that it is 10 minutes long. This is just a 30-minute album, so it's taking up a great deal of the runtime, so you kind of hope that it's really going to make the length of time that it lasts worth it. And while this track does have its moments for sure, it's far from Miss Holter's most gripping performance and composition, for a piece of this length.

And often feels like I'm just being introduced to a disparate number of ideas that fail to come together in a way that truly feels cohesive, focused. And by the time it's done, I'm more or less feeling like, that's it?

Oh, but of course there's "Materia 3," which is actually even less interesting than "Materia 2." Look, again, with this record overall, if you're a hardcore fan of Julia's work, I think there will be at least a little bit of something in here for you, because those baseline textures and familiar pieces of instrumentation that helped create so much magic on her past two records also show up here. But in my opinion, the compositions and performances are just not there in the way that they were on Julia's most recent works.

Not only that, but I feel like Materia fails miserably when it comes to achieving kind of those key moods and emotions that make Julia's work so exciting to listen to; that, again, the music is enchanting, is otherworldly, is immersive. That's maybe that quality that I feel like this record is lacking most in comparison with Julia's best projects. Cause Materia here really lacks the wondrous and ambitious ideas and sounds that I typically expect from Julia.

In fact, I would even say this record is making me kind of nostalgic for the aviary era, because even if there was a lot of extra material on that project and not every track was super pleasant to listen to because of how experimental it could be, at the very least, those moments were challenging and surprising in an interesting way.

Materia contains no such moments and is really not edge-of-your-seat at all, if anything. I feel near comatose when listening to most of this album, which is why I'm really not into it, though. I guess maybe a silver lining to this cloud is that once again, the material here feels more or less like leftovers from Julia's most recent record.

So when she does actually manage to come through with an album that feels like all brand new, ambitious stuff that's going in a kind of bold, new direction, I'm sure it will be much more worthwhile of a listen. But yeah, even though I'm not against the idea of a sequel or a sister album in concept, I feel like the material on such a thing still has to feel just as good as its predecessor or the ideas that it's building off of.

That is not how Materia comes across to my ears. This more or less just kind of feels like stuff that didn't make the last album because it just wasn't as good, which is why I'm feeling a strong four to a light 5 on this album.

Anthony Fantano. Julia Holter. Forever.