Throwing it all away and starting over can be an empowering narrative, but it’s not without its baggage. Having previously played in the band Little Fish and with the electronic collective Candy Says, Julia-Sophie’s debut album, Forgive Too Slow, introduces her as a solo electronic artist as well as an open-hearted lyricist.
On Forgive Too Slow, the baggage comes in the form of a long narrative of a doomed relationship (or several), a series of beginnings and endings. Julia-Sophie’s voice projects all the hurt, the vulnerability and the resignation that comes with telling that story. Whether a soft, sad croon or a resolutely detached spoken word verse, there is a palpable ache to her vocals. Her experimentation shows the potential of her voice, both on its own and through manipulation – a stuttered repetition of a single exhaled note on ‘falling’ fades like a mist into the background of the song while increasingly metallic elements take over.
Julie-Sophie has a particular talent for pacing her songs in that way. ‘i was only’ is an excellent example of how she builds a track, a single frizzy loop passing through the song for minutes as layers of dense, bright synths compound on each other and sibilant percussion ricochets around.
Drum programming plays a crucial role in defining the emotional tenor of the songs. The frequent shifts in each track are often led by a change in the percussion; Julia-Sophie is deft at creating and releasing tension in her songs, and the building up and dropping out of the beats is perhaps her greatest tactic for covering this emotional distance. ‘comfort you’ has an airy three-note synth line floating through the song, but the defining progression of the song is a shift from a galloping drum to a propulsive industrial beat.
It’s these danceable, almost club-ready beats that offset the tragic persona she’s crafted. ‘numb’ pulls a fatalistic spoken word narration into a floor filler. The driving electronic rhythm pushes against her vocals and the tragic persona she moulded for the song, collapsing so that only a staccato synth chime remains with the matter-of-fact repetition: “that’s how I feel”.
Julia-Sophie’s solo project hasn’t fully left pop music behind, and tracks ‘telephone’ and ‘wishful thinking’ in particular have a soft, 80s synth pop flavour. As singles, they aren’t accurate representations of the overall tone of Forgive Too Slow – though the lyrics are in keeping with the thematic heartbreak of the album, ‘wishful thinking’ has a positively bubbly arrangement. But even at her most approachable, she still concedes: “can’t save everything / look at the mess we’re in.” A reminder that she’s ready to start over again anytime.
