Julia Holter’s Materia was inspired by touring and her past demos

Julia Holter wanted to play a new song. It was 2024, in between spring and winter tours supporting her spring album Something in the Room She Moves, and she wanted something different for her band to play. The composer and songwriter returned to her demos and played around in Logic until music materialized.

“It wasn't really supposed to be a record in my head at first,” Holter tells The FADER from her Los Angeles home on August 13, 2026. “It was just that I wanted to make this song. But then that made me want to make new songs.”

Read Next: Songs You Need In Your Life This Week: July 29, 2026

Each song and jam session with her live band seemed to inspire the next, until Holter found herself with Materia, a full-length LP spanning recordings from 2020 to 2024. Common threads – reutilized MIDI sounds, consistent bandmates, a personal urge to excavate, explore, and expand her most recent album – bind these songs, which offer a succinct and potent snapshot of Holter’s expressive music, part baroque pop, part ambient classical. With the exception of the practically-one-take “My Lost One,” even the oldest of these tracks have been meticulously finetuned and updated, whether via re-recorded vocals or new arrangements.

In conversation, Holter credits her live band with helping define the sound of Materia and its predecessor Something in the Room She Moves: bassist Devra Hoff, clarinetist Chris Speed, flautist Maia, and engineer Kenny Gilmore, among others. But even as her resources and opportunities to record have broadened, offering Holter new scaffolding for her wistful soundscapes, the singer-songwriter says her intuitive recording process still feels quite similar to her early forays into DAW-enabled composition, even as her, “poetic approach has changed.”

The FADER got on a call with Julia Holter to discuss the inspiration for Materia, working with a larger band, and recording “My Lost One” in “practically” one take.

The FADER: Obviously this album revisits one song frequently, but do you feel like Materia is a continuation of the sonic palette and themes from Something in the Room She Moves? Or a deviation?

Julia Holter: The new one feels like a sequel to me a little bit, but in intent more than anything. I don't feel like it's necessarily obvious to other people; it just started that way and in my head, it's a continuation of that world. Often when I make a new record, I want to make something very different than what I just did, and in this case, I didn't really want to make something different.
I was still touring for the last record – we were on tour, we had a break. I was like, I want to make a new song for us to add to our songs we're already playing on tour. So it was all written for the same band and then I combined those new songs that I wrote for the band with the songs that came out of the demos from Something in the Room She Moves. So in that sense it really feels tied to that record to me.
And I do do sequels. I've done “Goddess Eyes I,” “Goddess Eyes II,” “Maxim’s I,” ”Maxim's II,” and, “I Shall Love 1,” I Shall Love 2.” So I've done sequels like that, like I'm doing with Materia, but I've never done an album sequel.

“Materia” is the crux of the record. Why did you decide to revisit this specific song?

The reason I wanted to expand “Materia” is because it has, no pun intended, a lot of material in it that is fun to work with. There's like this Hildegard von Bingen-inspired melody that has a lot of leaps, and then there's like this jazzy chords under it, and there was a lot to do with both the harmony and the melody in that song. It felt like there's more material than my other songs to work with, and the version of “Materia” that's on Something in the Room She Moves is quite sparse, and I just thought, it would be fun to do this with a band.
In addition, I made “The Laugh is in the Eyes” for the band and then I quickly made this one called “My Lost One” that was a lot of fun. And then “Fantasy” came out of this improvisation from 2020 for Something in the Room She Moves, which is now “My Twin.” All these things were just happening, but they felt very connected to the last record.
“Materia,” specifically that song, the interest was developing those ideas, bringing up the harmonies more. So I rearranged the melody for two voices, so Jessika Kenney, my friend, is singing with me and then the band is playing. I was playing on the Yamaha CS-60, [which] I play on a lot of the rest of the record and on Something in the Room She Moves, and Devra’s playing the fretless bass, which is a big part of the sound of both Materia and Something. And Chris Speed on clarinet for “Materia 2.” It created this whole world of sound that was a new way of experiencing that song.

You mentioned “My Lost One,” which was my immediate favorite off the album. Could you talk to us about putting that song together?

It was really fast. I was recording “The Laugh is in the Eyes,” and – it’s kind of an abstract thing to mention because it doesn’t really mean anything, but to me, spiritually it does. But “The Laugh is in the Eyes” came out of a Logic project file of other demos from Something in the Room She Moves. So I was in that Logic file and using a MIDI drum sound that I used just for the demos of Something in the Room She Moves. I used that to come up with the beat that made “The Laugh is in the Eyes,” and it was a similar thing with “My Lost One” where I built [the song] in that same project file. It just sort of came to me very mindless. I just started playing it and it happened. It was one of the quicker ones.There was very little struggle, and then recording it, we recorded just one take, basically. We didn't have a lot of time and it also was so fun because it speeds up at the end. So it's this very fun thing to do altogether with no click because it just speeds up according to how we do it, especially Beth the drummer, of course.
I think maybe we recorded the beginning separately, [or maybe] it was one whole take and we recorded some little pieces, but we maybe just used the one whole take. I don’t remember exactly, but it was close to just one take. Which is pretty crazy to me when you’re recording with a band and it’s not straight jazz. To do just one take was a first for me, and I think that wild, raw element is really fun.

You’re working with a larger band. Are you writing their parts? Are they improvising? What’s that dynamic in the recording process?

It depends on the song, but often what happened for Materia and Something in the Room She Moves [...] a lot of times, I come to the studio with a demo that can sometimes be very similar to the final version in terms of the structure and the arrangement and even the production, but I'll do a really, really basic version. But all of the data is there for the direction to go.
Sometimes it'll be very specific and sometimes, like “Sun Girl” from Something in the Room She Moves, that song was completely reconstructed out of the stuff we did in the studio. It was like everyone jamming in C Major or something that sounded so weird – that was the only criteria I gave for ”Sun Girl,” and it just sounded insane. It sounded like jam band, but then it just sounded chill. It’s so funny but I took those sounds and sampled them and then I rearranged the song completely. I don’t usually work that way, but that’s an example.

Thinking about your music over the years, where do you feel like you’ve grown or developed the most?

I feel really similar to when I first started writing music. I don't feel like my creative process has changed; it's more like my poetic approach has changed.
Actually, it's more like I've learned how to harness my ideas more efficiently, or I have more of a sense of it through experience. So I feel like that's the biggest change.
I also have more opportunity, so I have more ways to make music. My early recordings, I was making all myself. And I still do make a lot of recordings myself, and “Materia” has some tracks like that. Like “Clepsydra” or “My Twin,” which are all me basically – Kenny worked with me to engineer them and mix them and all that, but otherwise it’s me, I’m pretty sure.
But I think I feel very similar to when I started out. I still have this sort of wandering approach, and I make what I want to make, and it's pretty based in intuition and what I want to do. And sometimes it takes on more conventional forms like verse, chorus, verse, but sometimes not.
I think because I started out in composition school – like I literally started writing music with notation first, before I started making songs, before I even sang, really. And I think because of that, and studying orchestration on a basic level, that means I tend to think about things like arrangement very early on when I work on songs. I think this is very typical now of a lot of people, because everyone does everything now: people tend to write their own songs, produce their own songs, arrange their own songs. [But] when I was starting out, it was a little more uncommon because [not as many people] people had DAWs on their laptops and all of that. When I was first writing music on my computer around 2003 or 2004, it was a little more unusual that you would do all those things.