Julia Stone has earned recognition across Australia and beyond for her fragile, spectral singing style, which merges confessional acoustic songwriting with carefully crafted indie-pop arrangements. Initial public notice arrived through her partnership with her brother in the folk act Angus & Julia Stone, whose four albums all reached the ARIA top five and whose 2010 release Down the Way collected the ARIA Album of the Year trophy. While sustaining that sibling collaboration, she has also established an independent identity, issuing the evocative 2012 album By the Horns, which entered the ARIA top 20, and the 2021 set Sixty Summers, shaped in part by production and songwriting sessions with St. Vincent.
Stone entered the world in 1984 and spent her childhood in Newport, immediately north of Sydney, in a home where her father worked as a music instructor and her parents appeared together as a folk duo. Music lessons began early; she first took up the trumpet and performed regularly in a family ensemble that featured her brother Angus on trombone and her sister Catherine on saxophone. Over time her interests turned toward singing and guitar. By the conclusion of secondary school she and her brother had started composing and playing original material together.
Under the name Angus & Julia Stone the siblings issued two widely praised albums, 2007’s A Book Like This and 2010’s Down the Way. The latter proved a commercial breakthrough, entering the Australian charts at number one and ultimately securing five ARIA Music Awards, including Album of the Year.
Around this period Stone began a parallel solo career with the 2010 release The Memory Machine. Working with producers Kieran Kelly and Brad Albetta, she extended the moody, atmospheric textures she had first explored alongside her brother. Two years afterward she returned with her second album, By the Horns, recorded with Thomas Bartlett and Patrick Dillett and reaching number 11 on the ARIA chart.
A 2014 reunion with her brother produced their third album, the Rick Rubin–helmed Angus & Julia Stone, which marked their second consecutive appearance on Billboard’s Americana/Folk Albums chart and again topped the Australian listings. Their fourth album, Snow, followed in 2017, debuting at number two in Australia and earning ARIA Award nominations for Best Blues and Roots Album and Best Independent Release.
In 2020 Stone assembled the benefit compilation Songs for Australia, with all proceeds directed toward relief efforts following the 2019 and 2020 Australian bushfires; her own contribution was a cover of Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning.” The next year she released her third solo album, Sixty Summers, again collaborating on production and songwriting with St. Vincent and Thomas Bartlett, also known as Doveman. The record included the track “We All Have,” which featured a guest vocal from The National’s Matt Berninger.
