Julia Holter Talks Materia, Musical Remakes and the Influence of a Middle Ages Mystic

Julia Holter is one of the esoteric pop visionaries of our century; her distinctly unique approach to art pop composition and production is characterised by harmonically complex songwriting, and astute yet abstracted lyricism, all enveloped within a cloud of reverb.

Over a decade and a half, the Los Angeles-based musician has written and produced an expansive catalog of celestial yet hummable ambient pop, marrying modern sounds with classical touchstones

On Materia, the follow-up and companion piece to 2024’s Something in the Room She Moves (and this week’s RTRFM Feature Album), she reshapes and re-envisions previously recorded songs alongside new material, and the resulting seven-song odyssey is slyly glinting, dazzling and inscrutable.

RTRFM’s Simon Miraudo caught up with Julia to talk about her creative practice, what made the song Materia so magical it required two remakes, and how 12th-century German Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen influenced the record.