The crushing vulnerability of Julia Jacklin
“Well, I guess it’s just my life, and it’s just my body,” declares Julia Jacklin on ‘Body’, the opening track to her sophomore record, Crushing. In one line, she summarises the themes that go on to permeate the album – a sense of self, subdued vulnerability, and budding acceptance. They’re topics that have endeared Jacklin to a whole generation of women who find their own experiences reflected in her lyrics, their heaviness alleviated by indie folk guitars and soft snares.
Crushing was first released in 2019 and marked the follow-up to Jacklin’s debut, Don’t Let the Kids Win. Amidst the height of the sad girl indie craze, the Aussie’s sophomore effort secured her a place as an essential artist in modern indie scenes. Her soft indie folk contained a slightly more vintage sound than her peers, inspired by the likes of Leonard Cohen and Doris Day. She also loves incorporating pop sensibilities from her early love of 2000s pop stars, including the likes of Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears.
Though the music is beautifully subdued and masterfully produced, it primarily provides a comforting backdrop for Jacklin to paste her innermost thoughts and feelings onto. There’s an uncompromising vulnerability throughout Jacklin’s output, but nowhere more than on Crushing. As well as securing her a place in the indie canon, Jacklin also secured a place in the hearts of those who felt seen by the record.
In the process of making Crushing, Jacklin was able to find herself, too. As she recalled to The Guardian, Jacklin abandoned the pressures of complexity in favour of simplicity, stating, “I was too tired to try to be anything more than I was.” As a consequence, the album is deeply personal while retaining a level of accessibility.
‘Pressure to Party’ contains the oxymoronic battle between post-breakup FOMO and social anxiety even in simplistic lines like, “Pressure to come up with conversation”. Meanwhile, ‘Head Alone’ is a blunt statement against boundary-overstepping, which states, “I don’t want to be touched all the time, I raised my body up to be mine”. They’re experiences every woman has had, but that few of us have been able to distil as concisely or candidly as Jacklin.
On ‘Good Guy’, she somehow contains the experience of so many women who pursue relationships with men in just four minutes. It’s a track that displays the self-conscious need for male validation, “Tell me I’m the love of your life, just for a night, even if you don’t mean it”, battling against the built-in tendency to work around men’s feelings, “Come on, breathe in, breathe out, you’re still a good guy”. It’s such an intimate yet universal song that listeners can apply it to their own distinct experiences and feel seen.
Jacklin contended with non-romantic relationships on Crushing, too. One of the record’s most heartbreaking moments comes in ‘When The Family Flies In’, a soft piano-driven track that candidly shares the singer-songwriter’s experience of grief. Lyrically, it’s so devastatingly simplistic and mundane – Jacklin laments, “Oh, the last thing that I sent to you was an irrelevant music video, and I’ll always wonder if you ever watched it, thought you had longer to go”. It’s gut-wrenchingly honest – there’s no pretension whatsoever. It’s almost like a diary entry, but it’s a diary entry any one of us could have written.
Jacklin’s willingness to be completely vulnerable on Crushing and throughout the rest of her discography is what sets her apart from an increasingly monotonous wave of indie. Surrounded by warm soundscapes and delivered in big sisterly tones, listening to her music acts both as exposure therapy and a healing experience in itself.
On Crushing, Jacklin delivered both the softness and the weight that the title implies. Like a crush, the record is vulnerable and intimate, full of realisation and contemplation in its comforting instrumentals and relatable lyrics. At the same time, it’s hefty, carrying all the anxiety, embarrassment, and grief of being a young woman – but it provides all the more solace for it. Accordingly, it remains one of the most important albums of the last five years.
