Oxford and Lyon musician Julia-Sophie makes music about the temptation to relive your past: the more regrets that remain, the stronger the gravitational pull. Julia-Sophie dates several of her own regrets back to Little Fish, a short-lived garage frock’n’roll duo she led at the turn of the 2010s. Little Fish toured with Hole, Blondie, and Juliette Lewis (2010 was a time)—names splashy enough that, over a decade later, interviewers still ask about her stint in the band, thirsty for anything that might resemble Courtney Love goss. There are stories—a book-length mythology of this band exists, called Fuck the Radio, We’ve Got Apple Juice—but years later, Julie-Sophie remembered her time as a twentysomething industry scrapper not with rock bravado or “happy to be here” tact, but as a life that “broke [her], both as an artist and a human.”
Julia-Sophie spent the intervening years learning to unbreak herself—and to reconstruct her music. Little Fish sounded about what you’d expect from triangulating Hole, Blondie, and Juliette Lewis: solid, in a kitschy sort of way. Julia-Sophie’s next project, pop-adjacent collective Candy Says, similarly sounded about what you’d expect from a band that recorded a dark electro cover of “Running Up That Hill” for a Netflix movie. Then she went mostly solo, working with a collaborator credited only as “B,” and her music got stranger. Julia-Sophie and B share an affinity with downtempo artists like Four Tet and Nicolás Jaar for heady sounds and studio work engineered like a puzzle box. Percussion sounds like nervous flutters; arrangements sound like the claustrophobic interiors of bathyspheres.
“I feel like it’s been pretty intense listening to Julia-Sophie so far,” Julia-Sophie told The Quietus in 2021. Basic themes can be extrapolated from the titles of her past EPs, y? and </3, but the levity doesn’t extend past these cutesy winks at heartbreak and existential questioning. She hinted that the follow-up record might be “warmer”; that didn’t happen. forgive too slow is as grueling a listen, and as good an introduction, as either EP: songs, crystalline like teardrops, about mistakes, heartbreaks, and relationships that never got far enough to be either.
On paper, this doesn’t sound much different from the tastefully emotive pop that can be heard every week on BBC Radio 6. (Her singles have also been playlisted there.) But Julia-Sophie’s confessionals actually confess things. “Numb” makes a statement with a Depeche Mode synth-throb that goes past “chilly” to “unforgiving” and an equally self-lacerating monologue: “Instead of loving you back, I cheated and I lied, I lost myself in drugs and I lost myself inside.” The track derives its power not from raw emotion but from the dispassionate tone of a disaster surveyor itemizing wreckage. Preceding this is “Lose My Mind,” an electro track with an arrangement that sounds like it’s periodically overclocking and a mood heightened to the point of horror. Preceding that is “I Was Only”: a withering melody, a repeated shuddering chord, and a cocoon-like arrangement tuned for maximum 3 a.m. languishing.
That kind of stuff isn’t sustainable, of course. Just as evolution pulls animals ever closer toward becoming crabs, market forces pull downtempo artists ever closer toward crossover pop. To its credit, forgive too slow complicates what could have been mid, sadgirl mush. “Falling” is a slow-burn yearner, but it doesn’t enter the bedroom chorus without flipping “O Superman” first. “Comfort You” is essentially an adult-contemporary ballad—gloss over some of the lyrics, and it could soundtrack a slow dance. But its arrangement is bookended by a hesitant click track and an ominous buzz, and Julia-Sophie’s vocal never quite sounds present in the romantic moment.
And then there’s “Wishful Thinking,” one of the most overt Body Talk rips in a truly crowded field; the synth intro is right out of “Hang With Me,” and the general situation is reminiscent of a “Call Your Girlfriend” halfway-affair. Julia-Sophie’s song is more introverted than Robyn’s, and her story far less hopeful: This love triangle won’t be fixed by a phone call. But as a single, it just sounds like a ruthless pop pivot—one so effective that it actually misrepresents the album. “Wishful Thinking” makes much more sense in its proper sequencing. The following track, “Better,” is the bleakest on the record: plainspoken misery over a flatline buzz. But it ends with a reprise of the “Wishful Thinking” intro, not spangly but frantic, not neatly packaged but ricocheting all over the place. The two songs feel like halves of a complete story: having an illicit crush, giving it up or failing at it, then trying to summon the leftover energy to pull yourself out.
