ALBUM REVIEW: On ‘PRE PLEASURE,’ Julia Jacklin Calls from Common Ground

Julia Jacklin writes courageously, mining her own experiences with bodily agency, intimacy and sexuality, and all the hardest stuff to talk about to create songs so laid bare, you can’t help but see yourself in them. Everyone has felt their own shame, inadequacy, humility, and fear of death or losing loved ones, and Jacklin captures those emotions so uncannily, it can feel as though she wrote a song just for you. In this kind of recognition, there is much comfort to be found, and on Jacklin’s latest record, PRE PLEASURE, that solidarity is delivered with a warm and welcome looseness, like a hug from a friend telling you it will all be okay.

Jacklin has never shied away from a stark, quiet arrangement and, when she goes bigger, a more anxious, frenetic pop sound — think “Pressure to Party” and “Coming of Age.” But the songs on PRE PLEASURE have a free-flowing fluidity to them. They’re up-tempo but watery, with Jacklin’s same delicate vocals taking on an especially silky texture alongside tender piano keys and lush strings. This dreamy filter gives a self-assuring torch song like “I Was Neon” just as much heart as the minimalist, almost hymnal “Too In Love to Die.” A whisper of saxophone adds dimension to the gentle “Moviegoer,” while the driving melody of “Be Careful with Yourself” is soft enough around the edges to ease the pain of how closely its anxieties hit home.

With PRE PLEASURE, Jacklin invites listeners in as if to show them, “we’re all the same, breakable but resilient.” Whether she is finding some peace and acceptance in the natural growing-apart in a relationship in the airy, orchestral “End of a Friendship” or struggling through the discomfort of reconnecting to her own body on standout “Ignore Tenderness,” she is allowing everyone the same space she herself needs to sort it all out. As she sings in the latter, perhaps as a compassionate love letter to her younger self, “Leave no room for doubt that you are brave / A little leaf catching a wave / Strong but willing to be saved.”

Julia Jacklin’s PRE PLEASURE is out Aug. 26 on Polyvinyl.