Julia Holter’s New Album Contains Three Versions of One Song
Julia Holter’s seventh album is named after a song on her sixth. It contains two more versions of it.
Materia came out on 21 August through Domino, running thirty-four minutes and forty-four seconds. It is described as a companion LP to Something in the Room She Moves, released in 2024.
One Song, Three Times
The structure is unusual enough to need stating plainly. “Materia” was the title track of the 2024 album. The new record is centred on it and adds “Materia 2” and “Materia 3”.
Releasing multiple versions of a song is normal in dance music, where remixes are the currency, and in classical recording, where interpretation is the whole point. In songwriting it is rare, because a song is usually understood to have one correct form that the recording captures.
Holter’s approach denies that. Three versions of the same material imply the song is a set of possibilities rather than a fixed object — closer to how a composer treats a theme than how a songwriter treats a track.
“Materia 2” was released as a single on 18 August, three days before the album, which is a confident thing to lead with. It is not a new song; it is a second reading of one listeners already know.
The word itself is doing work too. Materia is matter, the raw stuff a thing is made from, and naming a companion album after the substance rather than the finished form is the clearest statement of what the record is for.
Numbering the versions rather than titling them differently reinforces it. “Materia 2” and “Materia 3” are labelled like takes in a studio log, which frames them as attempts at the same thing rather than as separate songs sharing a name.
Four Songs Written on the Road
The rest of the album comes from two sources. Four new songs were written and recorded with her band while touring, and the remainder consists of previously unreleased material and reinventions of songs conceived during the early stages of the 2024 album’s production.
That accounts for the record’s coherence despite its origins. Everything on it comes from the same body of work — either written by the band that had been playing the material live, or drawn from what was set aside while the first album was being finished.
Songs written on tour by a band already performing an album together tend to sound like that album. It is the same players, the same sound, and the same set of ideas continuing rather than restarting.
Holter produced it with Kenny Gilmore, and the arrangement of new-versus-archival material is what makes the companion framing accurate rather than promotional. Our piece on the vinyl variant question covers the commercial version of the same idea, and why this is not that.
A Single That Took a Year
The lead single, “Fantasy”, arrived with the album announcement on 23 June. Holter has said it took over a year to complete and went through various transformations.
On a record about multiple versions, a song that itself passed through several is almost too neat. It also explains why it was chosen to lead: a track that resisted being finished is a fair advertisement for an album interested in what a song can become.
“My Lost One” followed on 30 July, which Holter described as “inspired by children’s books with creepy rhymes and nonsense syllables”.
That is a very specific reference and a productive one. Nursery rhymes are the purest example of songs with no fixed authorship or form, transmitted by repetition and altered every time — which is the album’s argument in its oldest available shape.
One further track predates all of this. “The Laugh Is in the Eyes” was released as a standalone single in November 2024, a few months after the previous album, and is now collected here.
Four singles across twenty-one months is an unusually long tail for a record announced in June 2026. It also means the album gathered itself in public: by release day, a listener following her would already have heard four of its songs across two years.
That is close to the opposite of the standard model, where an album is assembled privately and then revealed. Here the work appeared as it was finished, and the album is the point at which it was declared to be one thing.
Thirty-Four Minutes Is Not a Full Record
The runtime places it deliberately. At thirty-four minutes and forty-four seconds, Materia is short for a studio album and long for an EP, which is the right size for what it is.
A companion release has to be substantial enough to be worth issuing and small enough not to compete with the album it accompanies. Too long and it becomes the seventh album in fact as well as in numbering; too short and it reads as an offcuts collection.
Calling it the seventh studio album rather than a supplementary release is the interesting choice. Holter could easily have framed it as an EP or a deluxe edition and given up the chart position; instead it counts.
That decision claims the material as work rather than as leftovers, which given how much of it was written on tour is a defensible reading.
The length also matches the listening the record asks for. An album built on repeated versions of one piece rewards being played straight through and then again, and thirty-four minutes makes a second pass a small ask rather than an evening’s commitment.
Reviewers Broadly Agreed
The reception was consistent. The album holds 7.5 out of 10 at Any Decent Music, with 8.3 from Paste, four stars from AllMusic, Mojo, Uncut and The Skinny, and three and a half from both musicOMH and Slant.
Ryan Reed’s Paste review ran under the line that the record “reveals new mysteries in Julia Holter’s voice”, and Paul Attard at Slant headlined his “With Materia, Julia Holter Discovers Beauty in the Margins”.
Both framings accept the record on its own terms — as something that works around and beside an existing album rather than in front of it. That is not the reception a companion release usually gets, and it suggests reviewers heard the structure as an idea rather than as an excuse.
The lower scores are informative too. Three and a half stars from two outlets is roughly what a record positioned as secondary tends to attract regardless of quality, and the gap between those and Paste’s 8.3 is a gap about format rather than about songs.
There is a wider point about how albums now behave. The format was fixed by physical media — a set of songs that fitted on a disc, released once and closed. Streaming removed both constraints without changing the convention, and a companion record like this is one of the few things anyone does with that freedom.
Holter is well placed to try it. Seven albums into a career built on formal experiment, working with a label that has released challenging records for decades, she has an audience that will follow a structural idea rather than requiring a single.
Two years after an album, with three versions of its title track and four songs written in the touring van, Holter has made the case that the earlier record was never quite finished.
Materia is out now on Domino.
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