Songs are, in their own way, a kind of time travel. A method of not only capturing and preserving the past, but reexamining it from new angles, a portal offering a second chance at addressing situations – and people – the physical world no longer allows us to access.
No one is more keenly aware of this intricate magic than Juice Webster, a Melbourne singer-songwriter whose debut album, ‘Julia’, claws at memory and ripples with grief and yearning, intimate fragments overlapping and interweaving with one another.
“I’m not really good at staying in the present,” Webster tells NME, sitting on the floor of her home where she says many of the songs on ‘Julia’ first began taking shape in earnest.
“I do yearn for things from my past, and I really do fixate on experiences or things that have happened that I feel like have just embedded themselves into my sense of being. And The album does fixate on those things.”
It’s a practice that Webster has been refining over the past few years. One of her first steps towards that kind of expression came when she was one half of downtempo electronic duo Hemm, which she formed with producer Robert Downie. Foregrounding their shared vocals with clubby synths and beats, the project was a “leap” for Webster, who had been writing folk songs.
“When I was writing with Hemm I was really interested in just broadening my horizons and getting better at things that I felt less confident in,” she says, explaining that the project began largely out of her wanting to learn more about production from Downie.
“I feel like Hemm was such a beautiful thing for me. It felt like I had the space to experiment and try new sounds. But I was still always writing my folk songs and making my own music.”
Webster’s first solo recordings emerged in 2019, culminating in an EP called ‘You Who Was Myself’. Those folk songs she had been quietly writing came to life, hinting at the Joan Baez and Jeff Buckley records her parents played to her as a child. But something more ambitious underlined them, and Webster would go on to explore a more spacious and ambient sound on her 2021 EP ‘More Than Reaction’.
“I feel a lot of grief around my past”
Building on these foundations, the songs on ‘Julia’ feel like both a significant shift and a progression you can chart from way back. You can hear their folk roots – Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker haunts the record’s quieter moments – but on ‘Black Coat, Black Skirt’, fuzzed-out electric guitars fizzle in the background, like in an Alex G deep cut. ‘In the Zone’ is heady and ethereal, but with the poppy immediacy of Phoebe Bridgers.
That’s not a coincidence. Webster says she’s become more confident as her songwriter, and feels her “taste and skill set” finally intersecting. “It’s a cumulative kind of thing. It feels like I’ve been trying to get here for a while and it’s a nice feeling.”
Webster created the bones of the songs on ‘Julia’ alone, before they developed into their lusher, livelier final states. She credits that shift to collaboration: Alex O’Gorman recorded the album with Webster and her live band, which includes Simon Lam of Kllo and Armlock providing production and keys, drummer Ollie Cox, guitarist Theo Carbo and bassist Noah Hutchison.
“We live-tracked it with my band, and I feel like that’s brought a lot of energy and character to the recordings that I don’t think I would have been able to achieve had I not made it with the people that I made it with.
“‘Black Coat, Black Skirt’, it’s so textural, and for me it feels very vibrant and playful, and I think that’s down to the people who played on it.”
Part of what makes the record so vibrant are the electronic flourishes that ebb and flow across the album: dreamy pads and glittery lead synths filling out the frames of each song.
“The more experimental or playful textures definitely stem from my love of more intricate electronic music, that I probably fell a bit more in love with when I was in Hemm,” Webster explains. “It does feel like it’s all coming full circle a bit.”
Many of the songs on ‘Julia’ are laser-focused on the past, examining how our personal histories almost inescapably shape our present. “I miss you every day, I’m yearning / But in his face is you, returning,” Webster sings on opener ‘Returning’, giving words to the sensation of constantly seeing someone you’ve lost in the visages of others.
That immeasurable toll of loss is felt throughout, often intensely. “Punch me in the teeth, I don’t need them, I’m not smiling / Think they call it grief, and like my headaches, I still feel it,” she sings on ‘Headaches’.
The title of ‘Black Coat, Black Skirt’, meanwhile, is a reference to Webster’s tendency to wear funerary colours. When releasing the song last month, she said she was trying to make “a bit of a joke about how maybe I’m always in mourning, or prepared for mourning, like Johnny Cash”.
“I feel a lot of grief around my past, or past selves, or past relationships,” Webster elaborates. “Not being able to return to certain times that I really long for.”
Many of the songs on ‘Julia’ are written in a distinctly second-person perspective, addressing an unseen, abstract figure. With their bracing honesty, many of them feel like the sort of letters one might write, place in an envelope and tuck away in a shelf, the task of putting pen to paper already enough. By sharing them the way Webster does, it’s an invitation into that intimate process.
“I don’t often actively have someone in mind when I’m writing songs,” Webster admits, adding that those specific meanings often come “in retrospect”. She said she used to feel “nervous” about addressing anyone too directly or offering too much specific detail in songs, not wanting people to get hurt by her words or feel like she was shining a light on them.
It’s a tendency she’s strived to overcome, acknowledging that it’s a necessary step “in order to write a good song”. At the same time, she’s insistent that the primary figure present in these songs is, ultimately, always herself.
“I write songs to figure out what I’m feeling”
“I feel like they’re very indulgent. It’s about me and my feelings, and I think that is why I write,” she says. “I write songs to figure out what I’m feeling, and I try to lean into that as much as possible.”
On several of the songs, it feels apparent that the ‘you’ figure being addressed is in fact Webster herself, something she says feels “really cathartic”.
“They keep asking for Julia / But she’s not in my heart,” she sings on ‘Without You’. Julia is her birth name, she explains: “When I was born, one of my brothers was only two years old, and he couldn’t say Julia. So he called me Juice, or ‘Juice-ia’, and [so] I’ve had Juice my whole life. I identify with that name probably more than Julia.” Nevertheless, she chose to title the album ‘Julia’ so it could have an “identity” and even “refer to [it] like a person” – grounding its introspective, intimate nature.
“I’ve been stressing about all the time that dissolves,” Webster sings on ‘Julia’ closer ‘All For You’, concluding an album that holds a microscope and a mirror up to time, memory, relationships, how they collapse and what lingers long after. Later, in the same song, she commits to continue moving through the world regardless: “I’ll keep my heart out ’til I die.”
Juice Webster’s ‘Julia’ is out now via Cohort