On her third studio album, Pre Pleasure, Julia Jacklin demonstrates that she’s the kind of talent who can have it both ways: She can be an unflinchingly personal lyricist who can also slam some rocking hooks together. The Aussie singer-songwriter has made electric guitar-driven music before, but—accompanied by members of Canadian folk rockers the Weather Station and aided by producer Marcus Paquin, who was at the helm of the band’s 2021 breakthrough Ignorance—she’s never made them as slick-sounding as, say, “I Was Neon.”
The chugging guitars and slightly dissonant harmonies of “I Was Neon” make the track Jacklin’s most immediate and accessible rock song to date. But there are layers of sadness that the track’s brash façade might initially obscure. “I was steady, I was soft to the touch/Cut wide open, did I let in too much?” Jacklin ponders, sounding as though offering her audience such a clear window into her world might have taken its toll on her.
But that question turns out to be little more than a passing thought, as Jacklin spends most of Pre Pleasure offering captivatingly penetrating personal commentary, whether backed by distorted guitars or mere whispers of arrangements. A pair of hushed tracks in the middle of the album, “Too In Love to Die” and “Less of a Stranger,” are breathtaking in their intimacy, with little more than a gentle organ drone and acoustic guitar strums, respectively, accompanying Jacklin’s silky yet understated croon.
On the latter track, Jacklin delivers a powerfully nuanced ode to an estranged parent—“Don’t want her to change/Pick apart or rearrange her/I just wish my own mother was/Less of a stranger”—and on the former she ponders her own demise, with the suspended notes of the organ seemingly stuck in time with her at the precise moment of death. She sings, “God couldn’t take me now/Surely the love I feel for him/Would save my life somehow,” a cleverly ambiguous line that could be read romantically or religiously.
The louder songs on Pre Pleasure are just as revealing and finely drawn as its quietest ones. On “Ignore Tenderness,” Jacklin offers startlingly confessional on grappling with her libido—“Been watching porn/Lights off, headphones on/Right when the pleasure begins/My education creeps in”—but sets her musings to swelling strings and lush melodic refrains.
On “Lydia Wears a Cross,” Jacklin tackles an even trickier topic than sex—religion—as she considers the joys and comforts that Christian pageantry brought her in her youth, juxtaposed by the bafflement she felt at the actual worship: “Knees and eyes closed I felt pretty/In the shoes and the dress/Confused by the rest, could he hear me?” The arrangement isn’t very complex, but as it builds from a stark drum machine and piano-driven intro to a swirling crescendo, the track starts to feel as huge and profound as the emotional truths that Jacklin faces with courage throughout Pre Pleasure.
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