“My Lost One”, Materia’s second track, is remarkable. Exemplifying the Julia Holter ethos to the max, it begins wispily with interweaving rippling electric piano figures, a whispered, echoey vocal and slippery acoustic bass. Gradually, grandeur is assumed: a sonic architecture soaring into and beyond the clouds, and outwards into the wider cosmos.
Despite the next track “Fantasy” having a similar, though much more brief exposition, nothing else on Materia is so strikingly consummated. The rest of the album is more muted, foggy, out of focus, restrained. Etiolated, even.
Overall, Materia is line with Holter’s adopted style. Her seventh album is very beautiful, and has a contrasting undertone of disquiet, but it does not in general push into new territory. Refining rather than advancing, it is her follow-up album to 2024’s Something in the Room She Moves. And the tie between the two albums may explain why Materia does not fully persuade.
Back in 2024, “Materia” was a track on Something in the Room She Moves. Now, Holter has decided to revisit it: Materia the album includes tracks titled “Materia 2” and “Materia 3,” each of which incorporates themes from “Materia” and builds on them. The inspiration for the whole of the new album is “Materia.”
Self-referential approaches are of course fine – David Bowie revisited “Space Oddity” and the Major Tom character. But it is hard not to wonder whether, by looking inward to her own previous recordings as an inspiration, Holter is occupying a potentially shrinking cycle of creativity. That niggle aside, Materia is, indeed, very beautiful. Nonetheless, it exists within an established safety net.
