Julia Holter

Loud City Song

It’s certainly Holter’s most accomplished and imaginative album

Loud City Song is Holter's most polished work to date, and another example of how she upholds and redefines what it means to be an avant-garde singer/songwriter.

Whilst it remains unpredictable throughout, Loud City Song is never anything less than completely thrilling.

Don’t let the singular beauty of Loud City Song fool you. Holter may write stunning pop-tinged songs, but she’s an experimental artist through and through.

Excitingly, ‘Loud City Song’ has an immediate pop whirl that should make Holter’s genius apparent to all, without sacrificing the California Institute Of The Arts graduate’s knack for intricacy.

The power of Loud City Song, then, lies not in the concepts upon which it deliberates, nor even the means through which it deliberates upon them, but rather how it translates these heady notions of the individual vs. the social, the Idea of the city, etc. into warm and loving compositions that first and foremost feel real. 

Like any modernist piece of work, Loud City Song consciously walks through paths that have been beaten before, but unravels threads out into new corners and ushers you in; records of this complexity and depth rarely feel so inviting.

It’s an impressive record to listen to—the compositions are even more beautiful than Ekstasis, even though they’re often more fragmented—but it’s also a frightening depiction of what it feels like to have a whole population making you up in its head.

Loud City Song is one of those records so full of un-jaded wonder and attuned to the secret music of ordinary things that the world looks a little bit different while it's playing. 

It’s the explorations of sound and bold yet gentle orchestrations that makes Loud City Song a perfect example of Holter honing in on her talents by evoking mystery but retaining enough openness to keep her sound in constant flux.