Julia Holter – My Lost One
Julia Holter’s “My Lost One” is the third single from Materia, her new album out August 21 on Domino. She calls it a witchy folktale, and the description she’s given is the best way into it: children’s books with creepy rhymes and nonsense syllables, trees growing through living rooms, animals doing things in clothes. She pictures wildlife moving into her home, the outdoors and indoors superimposed, a squirrel cooking a meal on her stove. It’s whimsical on the surface, but the question underneath, what are we conjuring, and what are we truly longing for, is the part that lingers.
The track moves the way that framing suggests. It opens on whispered, barely-there vocals, works in Chris Speed’s saxophone, and slowly builds toward a fast, delirious climax before an ending that lands with real force. Holter has a way of making the uncanny sound cozy, like a bedtime song that’s quietly turned into a ritual, and this sits right in that register.
What I keep coming back to is that closing question. It turns a song about a squirrel at the stove into something you can’t quite shake.
