Julia Cumming has spent most of her life in the public eye. At 13, she co-founded the band Supercute!; then, while studying at the specialized NYC high school PPAS, she joined the band Sunflower Bean. The latter undertook a relentless touring schedule, with music that was often a time capsule of the indie zeitgeist: 2018’s Twentytwo in Blue had a Trump 1.0 personal-is-political framing; 2022’s Headful of Sugar, made with frequent Alex G collaborator Jacob Portrait, offered chilled-out psych rock grooves. Meanwhile, Cumming was steadily gathering songs that reflected a childhood spent listening to the sturdy, well-crafted pop songs of Carly Simon, the Carpenters, and Carole King.
In hindsight, Cumming has said she spent the early years of her musical career trying to impress the slightly older millennials in her DIY scene—and then, after the pandemic, felt similarly out of step with the younger Gen Z crowd taking over. After all these years of misalignment, she tried something new. She camped out for six weeks in EastWest Studios to craft her debut solo record, Julia—channeling what she calls her “dorkiest” influences, joking that “your dad doesn’t even like this” music. Her own dad, a radio DJ and self-described poptimist, once contributed liner notes to a Burt Bacharach compilation, and that love of Bacharach is a defining touchstone for Julia. If you’ve ever noticed the time-signature changes on “I Say a Little Prayer” or showed someone the video of a young Karen Carpenter drumming, Julia is for you.
Cumming now splits her time between New York and L.A., and her solo record is appropriately made in the spirit of ’60s Brill Building and ’70s Laurel Canyon music, with some studio-rat yacht rock thrown in for good measure. She worked with a murderer’s row of session musicians and engineers, including Boygenius engineer Sarah Tudzin, Paramore rhythm guitarist Brian Robert Jones, and ubiquitous indie producer Chris Coady, who has worked with Future Islands and Tobias Jesso Jr. on records that similarly channel these eras. Making a vintage-indebted record usually means vinyl crackles at the start, or press statements bragging the band recorded to tape. But Julia is proudly modern, even at its most nostalgic. Highlight “Revel in the Knowledge” is totally era-and-genre-agnostic: Stereolab vocalizations, chintzy Prefab Sprout synths, The Association drums, even the occasional “Here Comes The Sun” nod in its tumbling riffs—lending the song an overall sense of familiarity that doesn’t ever feel like straight homage.
The lyrics here admit to an insecurity amidst years of “cool” posturing. On the laid-back shuffle “Ruled By Fear,” Cumming is forced to reckon with herself when she’d rather not feel anything at all: “What if I look too hard and finally find there’s really nothing there?” she sings. Fussing over “Please Let Me Remember This” led to a diagnosis of OCD, a condition reflected in the music, as the vocal performance grows increasingly desperate and the layers drown her out. The lead single “My Life” is a more standard contradictions-of-womanhood song in the vein of Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch,” Lola Young’s “Messy,” and that one Barbie speech, yet some of those proclamations—“I’m trying too hard”; “I don’t do this to impress you”—carry the weight of a decade spent battling other people’s snap judgements on her creative work.
There’s always some wrinkle in these songs. Sometimes they’re outright silly—what is the “Buddy Holly”-esque riff doing in “Do It All Again”?—but these diversions make the record stand out: for an album rooted in an “uncool,” stately form of music, there’s always some anarchic mischief on the edges. Most songs feature an unexpected chord progression or the occasional “wait, what did she just say?!” lyric. On “Forget the Rest,” she writes down every intrusive thought, from everyday worries like UTIs to physical impossibilities: “You let your goldfish drown/’Cause you went and fucked that guy.” The song avoids self-consciously “edgy” territory because Cumming isn’t trying to be edgy: The jokes and TMI lyrics are delivered like anything else on the record, better for their nonchalance.
Several labels rejected Julia before Partisan took it on; the process took long enough that Sunflower Bean released an entire album, 2025’s Mortal Primetime, in the time it took to get Julia out. But perhaps the timing worked in Cumming’s favor: There are now T-shirts defending Steely Dan (a riff on a Steve Albini tweet), and Cumming’s Partisan labelmate blew up with what’s essentially a contemporary Brill Building song. Even the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted The Wrecking Crew (to Carol Kaye’s chagrin). This kind of polished, meticulous music is having a moment, and Cumming has found herself in the zeitgeist without trying to capture it. Like the Sunflower Bean releases, it’s still an album of its era: Cumming’s description of Julia as “an album for the neurodivergent baddies and the neurodivergent saddies,” and the mere song title “Emotional Labor,” feel dated halfway through the second Trump term. But beyond that surface-level posturing, the album seems genuinely made without care for others’ perceptions. Its best quality—its top-notch craftsmanship—speaks for itself.
