In 2025, Julia Jacklin was ready for a change. After nearly a decade on what she describes as a career “treadmill”, with most of her working life two days’ travel from home in Melbourne, she was out of contract with her record label and without management for the first time since her early twenties. So she decided to try something she hadn’t done before: recording a whole album at home.
Home – as “Brand New”, which opens her fourth album and 4AD debut The Gem, makes clear – isn’t a static concept. Jacklin sounds skittish and unsettled on the song’s pre-chorus: “Don’t remember, don’t remember you/All that surrounds me appears as if new.” Yet there is possibility in familiar places viewed differently. “I’m free now,” she concludes, “let me be brand new”.
The title reflects the excavation and discovery promised by that kind of soul-searching, but The Gem is also a literal homecoming. It’s the name of the Melbourne dive bar where, newly arrived from Sydney in 2017, Jacklin would force herself out of the comfort zone of home and into conversations with strangers. Upstairs is the Rat Shack, a small recording studio where she spent a year working through what would become The Gem with co-producer and old drinking buddy Robert Muinos and a close-knit group of friends from the local music scene: guitarist Jacob Diamond, bassist Mimi Gilbert, drummer Jess Elwood.
In these comfortable surroundings, Jacklin feels safe enough to really get into it. On “If I Had The Hand of God”, she wrestles with the disconnect between being a touring musician and showing up in your own life, pairing everyday moments missed on the road – a neighbour eating a peach over the sink, a missed phone call from a parent – with the myth of the travelling rock star. The conclusion is stark: “What kind of life is it, after the show, to become an outline to everyone you know?” But the song itself, a country rocker with a triple helping of electric guitars and a toe-tapping drumbeat, has the brisk cheer of a pep talk from a friend who sees through the performance.
Elsewhere are hints of the toll constant movement takes on relationships. “The Hardest Thing” is both a vivid portrayal of a romantic ending and an exercise in communal catharsis, Gilbert’s backing vocals bleeding in at key moments like a reminder that good friends have your back despite the distance.
Sonically, Jacklin isn’t pursuing reinvention. Much of The Gem occupies the same country-adjacent territory she has explored since the start of her career without, say, the sad-girl doo-wop of 2019’s Crushing or the orchestral flourishes of last album Pre Pleasure. But what’s striking about it is its looseness, even at its most lyrically turbulent. “The Hardest Thing” and “Real Life” share a particular barroom jam band deftness, with drummer Elwood – who has toured with fellow Melbournians Angie McMahon and Alex Lahey, both of whom owe a sonic debt to Jacklin – giving the songs momentum rather than weighing them down.
“Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)”, the album’s funniest and most immediately infectious track, takes this to the next level. It’s a giddy, jangle-pop rush of a song that captures the first flush of a crush, straight out of the Melbourne scene of the 2010s – the bands like Twerps and Dick Diver that brought Jacklin to Australia’s second city in the first place. Above all, it’s the sound of a band cutting loose and having fun: of four friends who sometimes snuck downstairs after recording sessions to test their new songs on an unexpectant audience at The Gem.
It wasn’t always easy. Used to making records within the confines of a few weeks in a booked studio, Jacklin expected the songs to arrive quickly, but something about early material felt unsatisfying. Working with Muinos, she played around with “Brand New” and some of the others, reuniting the band in the studio almost a year later with what she describes as a “reset nervous system”.
The results justify the delay. “Brand New” sounds messier, more liberated, Diamond’s guitar tone humming with the rawness of the grunge bands Jacklin loved as a teenager. The penultimate track, “Walk On Me”, captures that same spirit, expanding over its six-minute length from a sparse two-chord guitar riff into something that feels almost improvised, the band filling the whole room with sound.
The record ends with “I Wish”, a stripped-back letter to Jacklin’s younger self, with sisters Elsie and Maggie Rigby of The Maes. The repeated refrain – “I got through/Yeah I’ll be fine/Still I wish someone had been there at the time” – undercuts earlier notions of self-reliance and is a reminder that life rarely offers easy answers. But if The Gem chronicles a period of uncertainty, it also documents the support systems that get you through it. With her people around her, it’s clear Julia Jacklin is going to be alright.