Oxford and Lyon musician Julia-Sophie makes music about the temptation to relive your past: the more regrets that remain, the stronger the gravitational pull. Julia-Sophie dates several of her own regrets back to Little Fish, a short-lived garage frock’n’roll duo she led at the turn of the 2010s. Little Fish toured with Hole, Blondie, and Juliette Lewis (2010 was a time)—names splashy enough that, over a decade later, interviewers still ask about her stint in the band, thirsty for anything that might resemble Courtney Love goss. There are stories—a book-length mythology of this band exists, called Fuck the Radio, We’ve Got Apple Juice—but years later, Julie-Sophie remembered her time as a twentysomething industry scrapper not with rock bravado or “happy to be here” tact, but as a life that “broke [her], both as an artist and a human.”
Julia-Sophie spent the intervening years learning to unbreak herself—and to reconstruct her music. Little Fish sounded about what you’d expect from triangulating Hole, Blondie, and Juliette Lewis: solid, in a kitschy sort of way. Julia-Sophie’s next project, pop-adjacent collective Candy Says, similarly sounded about what you’d expect from a band that recorded a dark electro cover of “Running Up That Hill” for a Netflix movie. Then she went mostly solo, working with a collaborator credited only as “B,” and her music got stranger. Julia-Sophie and B share an affinity with downtempo artists like Four Tet and Nicolás Jaar for heady sounds and studio work engineered like a puzzle box. Percussion sounds like nervous flutters; arrangements sound like the claustrophobic interiors of bathyspheres.
“I feel like it’s been pretty intense listening to Julia-Sophie so far,” Julia-Sophie told The Quietus in 2021. Basic themes can be extrapolated from the titles of her past EPs, y? and </3, but the levity doesn’t extend past these cutesy winks at heartbreak and existential questioning. She hinted that the follow-up record might be “warmer”; that didn’t happen. forgive too slow is as grueling a listen, and as good an introduction, as either EP: songs, crystalline like teardrops, about mistakes, heartbreaks, and relationships that never got far enough to be either.
On paper, this doesn’t sound much different from the tastefully emotive pop that can be heard every week on BBC Radio 6. (Her singles have also been playlisted there.) But Julia-Sophie’s confessionals actually confess things. “Numb” makes a statement with a Depeche Mode synth-throb that goes past “chilly” to “unforgiving” and an equally self-lacerating monologue: “Instead of loving you back, I cheated and I lied, I lost myself in drugs and I lost myself inside.” The track derives its power not from raw emotion but from the dispassionate tone of a disaster surveyor itemizing wreckage. Preceding this is “Lose My Mind,” an electro track with an arrangement that sounds like it’s periodically overclocking and a mood heightened to the point of horror. Preceding that is “I Was Only”: a withering melody, a repeated shuddering chord, and a cocoon-like arrangement tuned for maximum 3 a.m. languishing.