After more than a decade as a defining presence in New York’s rock underground with Sunflower Bean, Julia Cumming is stepping into her own light. Her debut solo album, Julia, arrives April 24 via Partisan Records, placing her alongside labelmates including PJ Harvey and IDLES.
Cumming has long been described as a frontwoman capable of shifting between softness and steel. But Julia is framed not as a rebrand, rather a creative rebirth — a record that trades persona for presence. After three years of writing through the pandemic and navigating the cycles of touring and recording, she describes a moment of release. “Then something shifted,” she says of the new single ‘My Life’. “It was liberation.”
That liberation is immediate. ‘My Life’ opens with spare piano chords and a declaration: “I sing these words for me.” It functions as both thesis and turning point, the song that unlocked the album’s direction. The accompanying video, filmed in London and directed by Edgar Wright, frames Cumming in a cityscape that mirrors the song’s quiet defiance.
Completed in Los Angeles over six weeks with collaborator Brian Robert Jones and producer Chris Coady — whose credits include Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV On The Radio — Julia leans into formative influences rather than distancing itself from them. Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Brian Wilson hover in the margins, not as homage but as grounding.
The record’s scope moves through memory and release: the ache of wanting to hold on in ‘Please Let Me Remember This’, the unresolved tenderness of ‘Fucking Closure’, and the rejection of external narratives in ‘My Life’. Cumming calls it “the ultimate anti-cool album” — a joyous space for misfits, particularly for girls who never fit neatly into anyone else’s box.
Stream ‘My Life’ HERE.
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