{"title":"Julia, Julia","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"derealization","title":"Derealization","description":"\u003cp\u003eDebut Solo Album From Julia Kugel (The Coathangers). If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is the crucial question at the core of Julia, Julia, the moniker for Julia Kugel, founding member of garage punk icons The Coathangers and the dream pop duo Soft Palms. On her first solo full-length album \u003ci\u003eDerealization\u003c\/i\u003e, Kugel shifts her focus from collaboration and band dynamics towards a singular artistic vision and private self-discovery. Steeped in the beguiling pop elements of her past work, \u003ci\u003eDerealization\u003c\/i\u003e is a meditative deep dive into the mind of a person struggling to understand a crumbling internal and external world. The album traverses a landscape of ethereal folk, atmospheric deconstructed pop, and dubbed-out country ballads, all centered around straight forward and direct lyrics. This juxtaposition of nebulousness and lucidity gives the album a sense of clarity emerging from the haze, an apt refection of Kugel's personal growth and journey toward self-acceptance.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eDerealization\u003c\/i\u003e is based on weaving the unreal, unsaid, and unknown into an undulating sonic fabric. Vocal layering and abstract instrumentation convey a blurred desperation to connect to an emotional and psychological focal point. Moody, dark, and sumptuous, the record is a flow chart of Julia Kugel coming into herself as an artist and songwriter. The album finds Julia playing almost all the instruments and taking her first stab at engineering at COMA, her and her husband's home recording studio in Long Beach, CA.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“You know how touring musicians often speak of whether home is real or tour is real? Well, it can lead you to lose grasp on ‘reality,’ especially when touring is taken away and you are left to wonder if anything was ever real, including yourself. Like you we're just playing a character,” Kugel says of her headspace leading up to the creation of Derealization. “Honestly, I kinda lost it, and through making this record I made peace with it and reconciled myself as a real person. I forgave myself and in turn forgave those around me. The song ‘Forgive Me’ is the apology I wanted to say and to hear. I wrote every song from that place and gained the confidence I was pretending to possess.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis raw and personal approach to the lyrics is present throughout \u003ci\u003eDerealization\u003c\/i\u003e. On the opening track \"I Want You,\" Kugel creates a woozy sense of space with reverb-soaked drums and spaghetti western guitars while she lists off her desires for a mysterious “you.” Is she actually listing off her desires for herself? For the people around her? As she repeats \"do you feel it?\" in the song’s chorus, it feels as if she’s conjuring a magical thread by which we are all connected, showing us how our desires are all the same. On \"Fever In My Heart\" the listener is treated to a lush, acoustic techno track detailing the exhilarating madness of an emotional breakdown. Simple truths percolate to the surface on \"Words Don't Mean Much,” as if clearing away the murk of platitudes and empty gestures. The journey continues on the detached and conflicted \"Do It Or Don't,” an alluring walk through the winding road of lonely choices.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe name for the project Julia, Julia is a look in the mirror, a refection of what is hidden and unanswered, of what is real and what is transient. The experience of living life not as you planned it but as it unfolded, and the mysterious, magical pain that creates meaning. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Suicide Squeeze","offers":[{"title":"Pink | LP","offer_id":50503785972043,"sku":"1161193","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50503785513291,"sku":"1161192","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/f5460961-e5a8-49e1-b9b9-4cd06d8053a8_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727798893"},{"product_id":"sugaring-a-strawberry","title":"Sugaring A Strawberry","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"UTF-8\"\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003eSugaring a Strawberry\u003c\/em\u003e, the sophomore record from Julia, Julia, is a study in coming undone—on purpose. Recorded at Coma, Julia Kugel's home studio, and mixed through a custom Flickenger clone, the album drifts in and out of clarity like memory itself. It's emotionally retrospective, creatively unvarnished, and deeply human. You can hear it in the hiss, the warmth, in the vocals so raw they're like an open window. These songs weren't engineered for perfection. They were built to breathe. Her long-time collaborator and husband, Scott Montoya, mixes it all so loosely that you can hear the air between tracks— a space that makes the music feel inhabited rather than recorded.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\"Bound\" opens the album like a secret passed between sisters, solemn and unspeakably close. It begins with the softest of touches: hushed guitar, a near-whispered delivery that carries the intimacy of someone singing only for one other person. It's a love song, but not romantic, more ancestral in the way long bonds can be. The lyric \"I will be your home\" is like a vow that has already been kept again and again. Hovering between devotion and entrapment, it unfolds slowly and sacredly. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAll glow and undercurrent, \"I Know,\" is like hearing someone hum through a wound. The track arrives as if it had been waiting, coiled and complete, to be sung. Its pulse is slow but insistent, anchored on a hypnotic loop and a vocal that's half-incantation, half-confession. \"But I'm a fighter now\" rises like a mantra, fragile but certain, the kind of line that doesn't demand belief so much as carry it. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOne of the most outward-facing songs on the record, \"Feeling Lucky,\" opens like a cigarette flicked in the dark– smoky and a little bit slick. Built on a skeletal beat and a nearly detached vocal, it leans into a sarcastic swagger that barely masks the ache beneath. The delivery is droll and glazed, the instrumentation is sparse and a little woozy, leaving space for her voice to sway—a shrug of a song, stylish in its sadness.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\"A Love That Hurts\" drifts in on soft, fingerpicked guitar and a dry, close-mic vocal that feels both haunted and immediate. The mix is stripped down and analog-warm, letting tape hum and silence frame the emotion. Julia sings like she's remembering something she doesn't want to, each line a slight unraveling. Like the rest of the album, \"A Love That Hurts\" doesn't push toward resolution. It sits in the ache, sifts through it, makes it beautiful. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003eSugaring a Strawberry\u003c\/em\u003e doesn't seek catharsis so much as stumbles into it. There's a quiet volatility to these songs like they might fall apart if you press too hard. It moves in shadow and softness, asking questions it doesn't answer. It doesn't end with closure. It ends with truth.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Suicide Squeeze","offers":[{"title":"LP - Strawberry Red","offer_id":53723143242059,"sku":"R0998-5533","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/a0947192805_16.jpg?v=1761332567"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/de\/collections\/julia-julia.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}