Another Gem from Julia Jacklin
- 19 hours ago
- 2 min read
For much of the last decade, Julia Jacklin has occupied a curious position in contemporary songwriting. She is widely admired, frequently cited by other musicians, and yet has somehow remained slightly outside the larger narratives that tend to gather around her peers.
Perhaps that is because her work resists easy categorisation. Across albums such as Don't Let the Kids Win, Crushing and Pre Pleasure, Jacklin has developed a body of songs that feel less interested in grand statements than in the uneasy negotiations that make up ordinary emotional life. Relationships, independence, obligation, self-protection: these are familiar subjects, but she approaches them with a degree of precision that can make them feel newly unsettled.
'Get Away From Me (I Think I'll Love You Soon)' continues that lineage.
The song is the first single from The Gem, Jacklin's fourth studio album and her first release for 4AD, due in September 2026. The record follows Pre Pleasure and takes its name from a Melbourne pub and live music venue that became significant to Jacklin after she moved from Sydney in 2017. The album itself was recorded in a studio space above the venue.
Even before hearing anything beyond the title, there is something recognisably Jacklin-esque about 'Get Away From Me (I Think I'll Love You Soon)'.
It contains a contradiction. A warning and an invitation. Distance and attachment occupying the same sentence. Throughout her career, Jacklin has often been drawn to emotional states that resist resolution. Her songs rarely divide people into heroes and villains, nor do they offer the comfort of certainty. Instead, they tend to linger in moments when competing desires remain stubbornly intact.
The context surrounding The Gem suggests that tension remains central. In material released alongside the album announcement, Jacklin spoke openly about the competing impulses of wanting intimacy while also wanting freedom, describing that conflict as a recurring question in her life.
What makes Jacklin compelling is not simply the subject matter itself, but the seriousness with which she treats emotional ambiguity. Many songwriters write about relationships. Fewer are willing to remain inside uncertainty without attempting to solve it.
That quality has earned her a particularly devoted audience. Recent reactions to the new single have been marked less by surprise than by recognition, listeners responding to a songwriter whose concerns have remained remarkably consistent even as her circumstances have changed.
The move to 4AD represents a new chapter professionally, but it also places Jacklin within a lineage of artists who have built careers on careful observation rather than spectacle. That feels fitting. Her strengths have never depended on reinvention. They lie in refinement, in returning to familiar emotional terrain and discovering that it still contains unexplored corners.
As a first glimpse of The Gem, 'Get Away From Me (I Think I'll Love You Soon)' offers less a declaration than a continuation. Not of a style, necessarily, but of a way of looking at the world.
The title alone captures something that has animated much of Julia Jacklin's work from the beginning: the suspicion that love and freedom are not always opposing forces, yet rarely sit comfortably beside one another. Some songwriters spend careers trying to resolve that contradiction.
Jacklin has often seemed more interested in understanding why it exists in the first place.
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