Julia Holter

With graceful fluidity, Julia Holter merges indie music, contemporary composition, and electronic sounds. Her initial recordings, beginning with the 2011 album Tragedy, wove together home-captured layers of sustained electronics and remote singing alongside literary sources such as Euripides’ Hippolytus. Subsequent projects revealed shifting vantage points: Ekstasis from 2012 wove chamber-pop textures together with texts by Virginia Woolf and Frank O’Hara, while the 2013 release Loud City Song reinterpreted both Colette’s novella Gigi and Vincente Minnelli’s 1958 film adaptation through bustling arrangements. Although 2015’s Have You in My Wilderness applied conventional pop frameworks to notable effect, the expansive double album Aviary in 2018 and the intuitive, continuous Something in the Room She Moves in 2024 highlighted how essential ongoing experimentation remained to her voice.

Raised in Los Angeles after her birth in Milwaukee within a household steeped in music—her guitarist father once performed alongside Pete Seeger—Holter took up piano in childhood and began composing original pieces at age ten. Classical studies were complemented by immersion in songs by Billie Holiday, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and Radiohead. During composition coursework at the University of Michigan she started documenting her own material, issuing the self-recorded Eating the Stars and Phaedra Runs to Russia in 2007. After completing her degree she pursued electronic music studies at CalArts under Michael Pisaro, whose work she had first encountered during a campus performance.

In 2008 she placed tracks on Monika’s 4 Women No Cry, Vol. 3 and a Human Ear anthology while issuing the CD-R Cookbook via Sleepy Mammal Sound. The next year brought involvement with the Dublab collective and an appearance on one of their In the Loop vinyl compilations. Her project of phonetically rendering songs originally performed in non-English languages surfaced on the 2010 track “Why Sad Song,” a Burmese lament included in the Beaterblocker #2 collection alongside contributions from Keith Fullerton Whitman and Eluvium. That same year she released the live-recording set Celebration on Engraved Glass Records, a further collection on NNA Tapes, and performed with the Linda Perhacs Band.

These endeavors preceded her first proper album, Tragedy, issued by Leaving Records in 2011. Drawing again from Euripides’ Hippolytus, the record fused altered electronics with classical and pop components, drawing praise from both print and online avant-garde outlets. Ekstasis followed in March 2012, presenting a lighter yet still intricate cycle of songs that marked her chart entry at number 49 on Billboard’s Heatseekers Albums chart. Amid her recording schedule she also tutored teenagers in South Central Los Angeles through a nonprofit program. Her third album, Loud City Song, arrived in August 2013, again inspired by Colette’s 1944 novella and Minnelli’s film; it climbed to number 19 on the Heatseekers Albums chart and became her first release to register in Europe and the United Kingdom, where it reached number 103 on the Official Albums Chart. The more intimate Have You in My Wilderness, released in September 2015 and shaped by texts from Christopher Isherwood and Colette, placed her vocals prominently and peaked at number three on the Heatseekers Albums chart and number 29 on the U.K. Official Albums Chart. Prior to the 2016 film score Bleed for This for Ben Younger’s Vinny Pazienza biopic, she collaborated with Ducktails and Jean-Michel Jarre. Early 2017 saw the live album In the Same Room inaugurate Domino’s series of artists revisiting signature material in a London studio. In September 2017 Holter premiered her score for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc at Los Angeles’ FIGat7th. Her fifth album, Aviary, followed in October 2017, an expansive double-LP exploring memory that featured Cole M.G.N., Kenny Gilmore, and Tashi Wada and referenced Vangelis’ Blade Runner score, medieval music, and Alice Coltrane; it reached number 16 on the Heatseekers Albums chart and number 73 on the U.K. Albums Chart.

Holter subsequently composed for the 2019 British series Pure as well as the 2020 documentary In My Own Time: A Portrait of Karen Dalton and the film Never Rarely Sometimes Always. In 2020 she also issued vinyl editions of her 2012 cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Gold Dust Woman” and the 2018 Adult Swim single “So Humble the Afternoon.” During 2021 she served as visiting assistant professor and Johnston-Fix Professor of the Practice in Songwriting at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Two years later she joined composer Alex Temple and the Spektral Quartet for Behind the Wallpaper. Her sixth studio album, Something in the Room She Moves, appeared in March 2024. Informed by new motherhood, the loss of her nephew, the Studio Ghibli film Ponyo, and the nature of creativity itself, the record blended ambient pop, jazz, and minimalist composition across its continuous pieces.