Julia Holter drops new single “Evening Mood” today, the track precedes her forthcoming album Something in the Room She Moves, available March 22nd via Domino Records. The “underwater” production style was informed by a heavy dose of Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo, her daughter’s favorite movie at the time, about a fish that turns into a little girl. “I was inspired by the transformability of creatures, and how this malleability works alongside our capacity for love. I wanted everything to feel very liquid,” she says of the song, which features a “heavily filtered ultrasound heartbeat” sent through a phaser. “I wanted it to sound like it was inside the body.” “Evening Mood” follows the previously released singles “Spinning” and “Sun Girl.”

Recent years brought about for Julia Holter an existential focus on human connection, amid the staggering change that came with the death of loved ones (including her young nephew, to whom the album is dedicated) and the birth of her daughter. On Something in the Room She Moves, Holter vividly processes the complexity, gravity, and awe of this confluence of experience. She calls the music “sensual,” “flowing,” and “nocturnal”–a testament to how love, with all of its challenges, “reroutes neural pathways.” The cover art by Holter’s childhood friend, artist Christina Quarles, highlights the multiplicity of intimate connection: are the figures embracing or in battle?

The title Something in the Room She Moves came to Holter spontaneously as she was naming the Logic project file for an early demo of what would become the album’s title track on her computer for the first time. Coincidentally, a few months later, she found herself mesmerized by the eight-hour cinéma-vérité Beatles documentary Get Back in 2021. Her titular phrase flips the gaze of the Beatles lyrics (“Something in the way she moves…”); the woman is no longer passively observed, but actively augmenting space. Holter has loved the Beatles since childhood, but sees the title less as a tribute than as a semi-surreal bit of automatic writing from her subconscious. (She had been singing Beatles tunes to her daughter at night.)

Julia Holter 2024 Tour Dates

Apr 7 – Nantes, FR @ Nantes Variations Festival
Apr 9 – London, UK @ Earth
Apr 10 – Saint-Josse-Ten-Noode, BE @ Orangerie Du Jardin Botanique
Apr 12 – Berlin, DE @ Colosseum
May 3 – Los Angeles, CA @ El Rey
May 4 – San Francisco, CA @ Great American Music Hall
May 6 – Seattle, WA @ Crocodile
May 7 – Portland, OR @ Aladdin Theater
May 10 – Minneapolis, MN @ Fine Line
May 11 – Chicago, IL @ Outset
May 13 – Toronto, ON @ The Great Hall
May 14 – Montreal, QC @ Le Belmont
May 15 – Boston, MA @ Brighton Music Hall
May 17 – New York, NY @ Webster Hall
May 18 – Philadelphia, PA @ First Unitarian Church
May 19 – Washington, DC @ The Atlantis
May 21 – Durham, NC @ Motorco Music Hall
May 22 – Atlanta, GA @ Masquerade (Purgatory)

Pre-order Something in the Room She Moves by Julia Holter HERE