Forgive Too Slow, avant-garde artist Julia-Sophie’s deeply personal debut album is testament to her ability to transform adversity into raw beauty, combining her traditional songwriting roots with her own take on experimental electronica. It features her intimate voice backed by warm and precise electronic sounds whose free spirited explorations give body to the carefully written personal songs.
Julia-Sophie comes off the drama of her 2010s rock band, Little Fish, which was signed to a major label. The surreal experiences (like being flown to Las Vegas in helicopters with a bag of slot machine money or given limousines for the day to go shopping), along with having to work in environments where she felt unsafe, drove her decision to leave the fame game. She turned down the offer to emigrate to America and engage with the machinations of the system as it did not feel “true or congruent with who I was.” Instead, she focused her attention on her hometown (Oxford, UK).
She started recording lo-fi pop in her garage, using an old laptop, wonky microphones and hitting whatever was around for beats. Her band at the time, Candy Says, grew to be more of a collective than a band, and eventually co-wrote a film score for indie film Burn Burn Burn and recorded a cover of “Running Up That Hill” for the Netflix film Close (starring Noomi Rapace).
Julia-Sophie soon started recording songs with her friend B, who had a studio stacked from wall-to-wall with analogue recording gear, vintage synths and drum machines. She decided to self-release and the music reached audiences beyond her expectations, including support from BBC Radio 6 and a feature in The Quietus.
Forgive Too Slow is Julia-Sophie’s debut solo album, and concerns relationships and the struggles one goes through when one “forgives too slow” and can’t break out of patterns from the past. The songs narrate her story of self-destruction (“Numb”), love (“Falling”), and loss (“Telephone”). By the end, embers are still burning and there is no telling if Julia-Sophie has found peace, but one does get a sense that she has gotten closer to the core of her being and is finally living authentically.
