“I’m really nervous,” announces Julia Jacklin, in the shabby chic surroundings of London’s Omeara. She need not be. Since the release of her debut album Don’t Let the Kids Win in 2016, the Australian has established herself as one of the most authentic singer-songwriters around, with her sound distilling aspects of alt-country into sparse indie-folk into songs about growing up and seizing the opportunities that life throws at you.
Here, the 28-year-old takes about two seconds to form a rapport with her audience, and the show is peppered with laughter as she cracks jokes about how flushed her face is, or stops a song halfway through because she forgot to explain something. She and her band alternate between older tracks and songs from her forthcoming album Crushing, which is out in February next year. Judging from what we hear tonight, it’s going to be rather extraordinary.
New single “Head Alone” is a sharp message to those who feel entitled to physical contact just because she’s a woman: “I don’t want to be touched all the time/I raised my body up to be mine,” she sings.
As a performer, she’s mesmerising: self-possessed and supremely unhurried, as she demonstrates how, just two years after the release of her debut album, her songwriting has matured to a level most artists twice her age would envy.
The follow-up record was born out of two years of touring that coincided (or clashed) with being in a relationship, so most of the songs home in on feelings of suffocation (emotional and physical) and crossed boundaries.
On “Turn Me Down”, a song about unrequited love, she offers one of her strongest and most affecting performances of the night: “He took my hand, said I see a bright future/I’m just not sure that you’re in it,” she sings, building to a hair-raising howl of anguish during the mid-section.
Jacklin’s style falls somewhere between the cool, contemplative indie-folk of, say, Angel Olsen or Cat Power, and a sound that recalls classic American swing bands of the 1940s: her early single “Pool Party”, with its gently swaying guitar rhythms and clear vocal delivery, evokes a young Doris Day.
She has evidently gone through some major changes, both personally and professionally, but she doesn’t attempt to hide anything from the listener. If anything, her new material shows her being even more honest than she was on the last record: she’s putting less pressure on herself to mask her feelings. Assisted by her lively band, who roll their eyes like long-suffering brothers as she picks a track from one of three setlists at her feet, she bares her soul in each and every song.
