The story behind Julia Jacklin’s new album The Gem begins with a familiar set-up: the end of an era. By 2024, the 36-year-old Australian singer-songwriter had released three acclaimed albums, toured the world, and garnered a base of devoted fans—but she was ready for a change. Her label contracts had run out and she’d stopped working with her management. “It was just this strange year where I was just trying to step back a bit,” she tells Vogue. “I really felt quite untethered, in many ways.”
So Jacklin did something she’d never done before: She left her Melbourne home for a year of solo residencies. In between opening for Mitski on tour, she spent months at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, The Beverly Theater in Las Vegas, National Sawdust in Brooklyn, The Lyric Theatre in London, and at an artist residency in Iceland.
After all that, she had a strong urge to “make a record at home,” she says. This was a new approach for her—she’d always felt like she had to leave her regular life to create new work. But the album process turned out to be one of her favorites yet: She worked in Melbourne at a music studio above a pub called The Gem, which has been one of her hangouts since she moved to the city in 2017. She made the album with Robert Muiños, an old friend of hers. “It felt like when you first start making music and you just gather your friends and you go somewhere local,” she says. “And so it was a very nice return to something after a lot of searching away.”
The whole process took about a year and a half, as Jacklin scrapped a version of the album to make sure she loved the whole thing—and the result is quiet, ethereal, and contemplative, but also tinged with pop-rock influence. (One example is “The Hardest Thing,” which—as Jacklin said in a surprise show in Brooklyn over the summer—she wanted to sound like Sugar Ray and “American summer.”)
Below, Jacklin talks to Vogue about the process of making The Gem, her childhood music taste, tour outfits, love, and more.
Vogue: I’d love to hear what inspired you creatively when you were making the album. Were you listening to or watching anything in particular?
Julia Jacklin: I have a very busy brain, so I do try to not absorb too much when I’m in those periods. For the first month when I was doing the Hollywood Forever residency, I was also opening for Mitski in between, and that was amazing because she was also playing these big theaters and doing multiple nights. I had opened for Mitski in 2017 as well. So I was at school a little bit in that first month, and absorbing her work and seeing how she had grown as an artist and the way she had not just changed her show, but also how the whole thing was conducted. And she’s just such a pro. That was a really cool thing to be able to witness at the beginning of this year of discovery. I’d just been doing the same thing for eight years, in many ways.
