Julia-Sophie reintroduces herself with forgive too slow

She got her start in the late 2000s with the garage rock band Little Fish. The band made their way to LA, inked a major label deal, and released one full-length record, but she soon became disillusioned with the pressures and cynicism of the record industry and decamped back to her hometown in Oxford. There she reconnected with the local DIY culture and began crafting lo-fi indie pop in her garage, forming synth pop outfit Candy Says.

After a long period away from music, In recent years Julia-Sophie has once again remade herself. She is now carving a place in experimental electronic music, pulling together ambient, IDM, and indie pop influences into an intimate and magnetic swirl of sounds. She debuted under her name with a series of EPs, 2020’s y?, 2021’s </3 (heartbroken), and 2022’s it feels like thunder. Each EP saw Julia-Sophie stretching her reach in new directions. At one moment she could touch on skittering dance beats, but the next might see her retreat into bleak minimalist soundscapes. Now, with multiple reinventions behind her, Julia-Sophie once again is finding herself on her debut solo album, forgive too slow.

Julia-Sophie is often a spectral presence on the album, her vocals barely rising above a subdued murmur. Instead, she puts the spotlight on her instrumentals, crafting intricate spirals of analogue synth textures and tightly wound beats. That is the space she occupies on the fittingly nocturnal opener, “2am,” which acts as a simmering introduction before she follows with the intoxicating lull of “i was only.” The latter track is an early highlight on the record, one that steadily builds into a layered scrawl of scattered beats, buzzing synth loops, and hypnotic vocal intonations. Julia-Sophie anchors the instrumentation around the track’s refrain, repeating like a constant unshakeable thought running around her head: “I was only falling in love with you.”

In these moments, Julia-Sophie evokes a delicate balance, her vocals lilting above beats that thrum with urgent intensity. Tracks like “comfort you” or “better” are works of contrasts, immersing the listener in nervy rapid-fire rhythms alongside icy washes of synths or haunting vocal melodies. The results feel illusory and contradictory, placid when viewed from one angle and storming when viewed from another.

Similarly, her lyrics throughout the album wrestle with uncertainty, self-destruction, loneliness, and anxiety, mirroring the turmoil running underneath the tracks’ tense rhythms. Even when the record offers a warm and wistful respite with “wishful thinking,” the lyrics imply the relief is only a comforting fantasy: “What a wishful thinking / I could make you mine / Tell me something nice.” Simultaneously, Julia-Sophie tempers these chaotic elements with tracks that unfurl in a more linear progression, such as the ambient soundscapes and lush, layered textures on “just us,” or the shimmering, futurist electronic pop of “falling.”

Yet, even at her most direct, Julia-Sophie retains a constant intimacy to her songwriting. The insistent, ever-present drums on “numb” offer a pounding and aggressive undercurrent to the track, yet the buzzing vocals and lyrical meditations on self-destruction leave it feeling deeply insular. Later, she closes the album on a gorgeous note with “telephone,” a longing pop confessional traced with simple and plaintive imagery: “Call me up tonight / I wanna cry on the telephone / Meet you on the Cowley Road / We'll share chips on the way home / Call me tonight / I'm staring at my telephone / All dressed up tonight with nowhere to go.” Though these tracks could be reimagined for a club or a dancefloor, even at their most vibrant they feel better fit for a moonlit headphones listen.

Most of all, Julia-Sophie suffuses a sense of personal and creative restlessness at every level of forgive to slow. Her songs are filled with uncertainty in uncertain times, capturing the difficult process of rediscovering who you want to be and what art you want to make. Simultaneously, her willingness to travel down stylistic rabbit holes lends a vulnerability to her compositions as she cobbles together hypnotic hooks unburdened by expectation. “I think people assumed that the music I made was exactly what I intended to make, when it’s always just been me trying to figure it out,” Julia-Sophie explains. “I didn’t grow up surrounded by music, I had to figure it out as I went along. Being a solo artist has now allowed me to really find myself and show who I am in all my messy states.” After a career of reinventions, Julia-Sophie once again reintroduces herself with forgive too slow, weaving fractured melodies, elliptical beats, and creeping anxieties into a beautiful and deeply authentic work.