Julia Holter's Happy Accident: How a Tour Bonus Track Grew Into New Album 'Materia'

During a break in her spring-to-winter 2024 tour, Julia Holter wanted to give her band a new song. She was touring behind her previous album, Something in the Room She Moves, but didn't want to keep playing the same setlist night after night. She dug up her old demos, pieced things together in Logic, and the music just started coming together.

"There was no thought in my head at first about making an album," Holter said during a video interview with The FADER from her home in Los Angeles on August 13. "I just wanted to make that one song, and that song made me want to write more new ones." One song led to another, and combined with live improvisation sessions with her band, it all snowballed into a full album pulling from recorded material spanning 2020 to 2024 — Materia.

The Title Track "Materia": Born From a Hildegard von Bingen-Style Melody

The title track "Materia" already existed in a thinner form on Something in the Room She Moves. Holter describes the melody as having Hildegard von Bingen-style leaps, laid over jazz harmonies — "lots of material, really fun" — and she'd always wanted to find the chance to rework it with a full band. This time, she arranged the melody into two vocal parts, bringing in friend Jessika Kenney to duet with her, bassist Devra Hoff on fretless bass, and clarinetist Chris Speed joining in on "Materia 2," while she herself played the Yamaha CS-60 synth — elements that also run throughout the overall sound of Something in the Room She Moves.

The seed for another track, "My Twin," was actually an improvised fragment recorded back in 2020 for the previous album, which Holter called "Fantasy" — it's now reborn in a new form on this record. She also mentioned "Sun Girl" from the previous album, which started as a strange improvisation the whole band did in C major, which she later sampled and rearranged into its final shape — a process she admits she doesn't often use.

"My Lost One": Nearly a Single Take

Holter says the fastest song to come together on this album was "My Lost One," recorded in almost a single take. It started when she reopened an old Logic project file containing demos from Something in the Room She Moves while recording "The Laugh is in the Eyes." She reused the MIDI drum sounds from that original demo to build the rhythm, and then, almost with an empty mind, played out the seed of "My Lost One."

With limited studio time, the band recorded the song almost entirely in one full take, without a click track — the tempo naturally sped up toward the end, following drummer Beth's feel. "Recording a non-jazz song with a full band in a single take — that was a first for me," Holter said. "That raw, slightly-out-of-control feeling was really fun."

Holter views Materia as a "sequel" to Something in the Room She Moves — not a deliberate sonic continuation, but an extension of creative intent: the same band, the same batch of unused material, the same impulse to dig deeper and expand. She mentions she's written single-song sequels before, like "Goddess Eyes I / II" and "Maxim's I / II," but this is the first time she's treated an entire album as an extension of the previous one.

Asked about how her creative process has changed over the years, Holter says her actual way of working hasn't changed much — what's changed is her "way of handling poetics," and, as she puts it, "through experience, getting better at efficiently capturing ideas." She trained formally in composition, and originally wrote sheet music rather than songs, only starting to compose using a computer DAW around 2003 or 2004 — back when not many musicians wore the hats of writer, producer, and arranger all at once.