On her second album, Julia Jacklin is discovering her body, and she just wants to see it for herself. “Give me a full-length mirror/So I can see the whole picture,” the Australian singer-songwriter implores; “My head alone gives nothing away.” She winds up clambering onto a chair to get a better look at herself, grasping for self-knowledge in the reflection staring back at her. It’s a simple shift in perspective, but one that makes all the difference.
This act of reframing lies at the heart of Crushing, an album that charts the devastating duality of its title—the way something innocuous and tender can transform into something so debilitating. Across 10 songs, Jacklin examines relationships in crisis, all the while fighting to center herself in the viewfinder and repossess her body, heart, and mind. “Started listening to your favorite band/The night I stopped listening to you,” she sings on “You Were Right,” a song that kick-starts the arduous process of extracting a one-time partner’s opinions from her own. It seems to have a happy ending: “Started feeling like myself again/The day I stopped saying your name,” is her assured conclusion in the final verse, peppered with energetic bursts of guitar. But most of the time, it’s not so easy; there are a million holes to patch, a million fits of uncertainty to endure before that sort of relief will come.
Take opener “Body,” a somber, simmering epic. The song, rooted in a real-life event, hinges on a compromising photo taken by an ex-boyfriend, and the fear that he’d use it to get back at her. In the end, she can only shrug: “I guess it’s just my life/And it’s just my body.” The repeated phrase is ironic and earnest in equal measure, covering all the ground between the heart’s genuine suffering and the head’s nihilistic recognition that, in the end, it probably doesn’t really matter. The vulnerability in Jacklin’s voice—delicate and fleeting as snow melting on exposed skin—brings real intensity to the song, though it’s built on just a handful of quiet chords and never accelerates past a slow creep. Here, and just about everywhere else on the album, the arrangements are noticeably deprioritized. They’re mostly limited to understated passages of crisp, measured guitar and basic kick-and-snare patterns, there to set Jacklin’s pace, then step aside and let her vocals and storytelling do the heavy lifting.
As much as Jacklin’s writing is steeped in the knowledge that there is work to be done—to fill in the space left behind by a loved one, to practice self-care instead of looking after someone else—some of her most affecting writing is borne of what comes before that process begins. Ahead of the work, there is stillness: prescience, accompanied by temporary paralysis in the face of the truth. On “Good Guy,” Jacklin begs a paramour to profess love for her, knowingly putting off the reality she’ll have to contend with come daylight. “Don’t Know How to Keep Loving You” captures a moment of impasse, when she recognizes that she and a partner have grown into each other so much that being together is almost the same as being alone. Instead of wrenching herself away, Jacklin wants to make concessions: “What if I cleaned up, what if I worked on my skin?/I could scrub until I am red, hot, weak, and thin.” Sometimes, breaking our own bodies seems a less daunting task than breaking the hearts of those we love.
“Turn Me Down,” the penultimate track, marks Crushing’s emotional peak, but still hovers in the moment before the moment. Impending breakup looms over a two-day drive to Melbourne; Jacklin, following a gorgeously cascading melodic line, pleads for her partner to end things so she won’t have to summon the courage to do it herself. It’s unclear how much of this drama is spoken out loud and how much takes place in Jacklin’s mind, but as her delivery builds to a near-scream, you can imagine the sentiment beating against the walls of her skull as the two drive silently into the night. Over barely there guitar accompaniment, Jacklin closes out the song with a gut punch: “Don’t look at me, look at the center line/Maybe I’ll see you in a supermarket sometime.”
It’s hard not to tumble into Crushing’s vast emotional depths and look past everything else that makes the album exquisite, but lyrics like this showcase just how clever Jacklin’s songwriting can be. There are the subtle twists of irony, yes—her pan of self-involved dudes on “Convention,” the implied eye-roll in her refrain on “You Were Right”—but also careful choreography behind what scans as raw feeling. Jacklin has an ability to mine minuscule details from immensely complex situations and package them in searing couplets. It’s why you’re likely to walk away from this record thinking about an estranged someone you dread running into at the grocery, or the casual cruelty of giving up on your own body, or the fraught goodbyes you’ve had to say. “Are you thinking of me too?” Jacklin muses in the final moments of the album, “I was so happy all those years with you.” Her well-chosen words reverberate endlessly.
