On the Rise
Julius Black

Julius Black dares to open a burning door. He’s in the middle of nowhere, lost in a vast expanse of nothingness, and there is a fiery anticipation in the air – almost too hot to touch. There’s no telling where the door could lead to. The thought is bigger, now, than the simple act of opening it, and yet, at last, Black braces himself and walks into something new. It’s only then that he realises that the flames he feared were a projection of his mind, holding him back from moving forward. That’s what anxiety feels like, the 20-year-old New Zealander explains – and that’s why this was the cover art for his debut EP, Dopamine.

The five-track act is a panoramic, deeply introspective statement of intent. It’s a sound which is at the forefront of a new generation of artists who have graduated from the school of Frank Ocean. “I spent a long time figuring out what kind of artist I wanted to be,” Black says. “I really wanted to find a sound that was cohesive enough – something I could be proud to put out into the world.”

What weaves these five tracks together is the production which, in the same breath, is what sets them apart. “They belong in the same universe,” he explains. It might not sound like it, at first, with “Mirrors” and its delicate, nocturnal style countered with the kaleidoscopic wonderland of “Dopamine”, anchored by blown-out guitar lines and freak-out drums – but each one, when you step back, forms a bigger picture.

“I think the main theme on this EP is anxiety,” Black says, “and the ways it affects everything from my relationships, to my personal life and the little things in every day.” If anxiety is the motif of his music, then honesty is its backbone. “I started making these songs purely out of being honest with myself,” he explains. “The level of truth is the benchmark I measure my music against. The more honest I am, the more people can connect with it. When I first started writing the EP, no one was listening to my stuff, and now people are starting to take notice, it’s like my honesty has been rewarded.”

Black recalls who he was when he began penning Dopamine: an 18-year-old out of his depth, moving from his home, the botanical city of Christchurch, to Auckland, the country’s thriving metropolis. “A series of things went wrong for me,” he admits, one of which being that two hard drives with his work had corrupted. “I’d just started out in music, and I was just in a really anxious and lonely stage of my life.” Living alone, the latent stages of the EP were what kept him company - and yet, it was the very same music that would attract the company of greatest people into his life and would confirm that this was where he was meant to be.

Everything changed when he found his collaborator, closest ally and best friend, Struan Finlay. “He’s a genius,” Black insists, and he means it. His own success is something he shrugs off, but when it comes to giving Finlay his due praise, Black lights up. “He’s got this really interesting way of producing: he thinks outside the box without even having to try. It’s actually really frustrating to watch him do it,” he laughs. “I’m just like, ‘This is unfair!’”

Their dynamic was formed over a mutual passion for music, long before they ever set out to work together. It established an unshakeable foundation that has allowed the pair to transcend the usual constraints of a working relationship, while still being unafraid to maintain an air of professionalism that protects their underlying friendship. When Black had a small budget to work on Dopamine, it would be Finlay who he would reach out to. From the start, he believed in the project. His production style is soft and yet eclectic: a canvas splattered with a thousand pastel shades. It’s easy on the ears, and yet it retains a sense of spontaneity that means Black’s music is beyond prediction.

For Black, Dopamine captures an era – not just in terms of his craft, but an era of his life. “It’s a fun representation of the last year and a half of my life – I just had a lot of fun making this EP, and I think I’m always going to remember it that way. When you first start making music, it’s really pure: I’ll always look back on this project as a time where there was no pressure. It’s a product of all my favourite influences. It’s like a nice time mark in my life.”

The EP is a melting pot of defining Gen Z records, all representing a sonic universe that Black has invited into his orbit. The fingerprints of The 1975’s record, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, can be heard in the nomadic approach Black takes to genre: “It made me realise I could do literally whatever I want, tie it in with my voice, and make it a part of the same world.” The frazzled guitar lines of Phoebe Bridgers’ seminal album Punisher can be heard, as well as the emotive, playful pitching of Kevin Abstract’s ARIZONA BABY. He even draws from the sci-fi thriller Tenet, bringing drums inspired by the film to ripple under the surface.

With these kinds of strings to his bow, it comes as little wonder that Julius Black is ambitious. Having been brought up in Shanghai until the age of thirteen, a strict work ethic had been instilled within him from a young age. “The culture there was work hard, hustle hard,” he explains. “I started piano lessons when I was four - you had to work really hard to get ahead. That same drive and ambition still lives on within me.”

“Electric Blue” sees Black look ambition squarely in the eye as something that has limited him just as equally as it has propelled him forwards. “Ambition can be the reason you get out of bed, sometimes,” he admits. “But I think once you start putting expectations on what you do, like meeting a million streams, or ten million streams – whatever it may be – it definitely starts taking a toll.” He prefers to measure success by what he can control. “Rather than thinking, ‘I want this many streams’, I put my ambition into and heart into things I can control, like challenging myself to write however many songs in a day – that way, you can’t be disappointed.”

As a child, Black was a daydreamer: “I had an issue with it when I was younger,” he says. “I still kind of do now, but when I was a kid, I’d spend hours listening to different genres, and that’s bled into who I am now.” His dad introduced him to the melodicism of The Beatles from a young age – now, when he writes, the foundation upon which the rest of the music depends is the melodies he absorbed from hours of listening to their records. “Electric Blue”, he explains, draws on that era of sound, with the warm breeze of Andy Williams’ “Moon River” being a well of inspiration.

Music was always Black’s first love, mastering an array of instruments from a young age with reflexive ease. But it would only be in his late teens the Black, at last, would turn his attention to his voice: the hardest part. “I went to a Catholic boys’ school, and I had a lot of pimples and I had, um… I had acne, and I was, like, very chubby and I had braces and everything. I was quite nerdy looking,” he shares. “Maybe because I wasn’t good at anything else, it gave me more confidence - so I just kept at it.”

When he met Ezra Vine, the folk-steeped singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist behind “Celeste” a track that has since garnered in excess of 84 million streams, Black began to trust in his abilities as a songwriter. The two came together at Parachute Music, a non-for-profit organisation in Auckland with an aim to nurture blossoming talent. “It was a hub of studios where you could just hang out, hide away, and be part of a really great community,” he remembers. It was there that the first Julius Black songs were written.

Under Vine’s wing, they would co-write “Electric Blue” together. “He really helped me with my mindset,” Black recalls. “He made me realise that the results shouldn’t be the goal. The goal should be, if you’re a writer, to simply write – the more you write, the better you get, and that should be the focus, you know? I feel like that has helped me so much with song writing and learning to get out of my own head, so I don’t cave under the pressure of it all.”

When he told his parents that music was the career he wanted to pursue, he wasn’t met with resistance, but with the truth: “My dad said if you want to go into music, then you have to work your ass off – don’t just say you’re going to do it, and then not actually do the groundwork.” All he needed was his dad’s opinion, and as he swallowed the bitter pill that the path he’d chosen would not be an easy one, he at last chose to act on the greenlight he’d been waiting for. “I figured once you start doing the thing you’re best at, and you really put everything into it, sometimes it does just work itself out because you push harder than other people. And for me, it was definitely like that with music.”

For that reason, Black didn’t make a back-up plan. Even when the COVID-19 pandemic derailed his plans to study at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, choosing to stay at home in Christchurch instead, Black was confident that everything, in the end, worked out for the best. “I’m living cheaply in Christchurch, in the middle of nowhere, making the music I’m most excited about with my best friends,” he says. “So, the way things are now is my dream scenario.”

While the creative hives of London and LA have their allure, with his long-time collaborator Struan Finlay onside, who understands Black’s creative intentions almost intuitively, Black feels he doesn’t need to find like-minded people – he has them right here. “I feel like with musicians, you don’t really make that much money in the first few years – to add living in a big city on top of that works of to be really, really expensive. When that kind of pressure is on, it’s difficult to make the music you want to be making anyway. The less I had to worry about money, the better the music was that I made.”

His label is UK-based, and while he’s never met them, he doubts he’ll ever need to. “I just do what I do here, and then they help me over there,” he says. “I’ve got my own little machine going here, and it works for me.” Like many artists of his generation, he has been raised under the hothouse lights of the internet where success is borderless and accessible to anyone with the ambition to go out and seek it – and Julius Black has that in spades.

But his greatest ambition of all, he says, is to simply keep growing. The finishing touches are already being made on Black’s second EP, which producer Struan Finlay already prefers and holds the promise of something a little different to the legacy of Dopamine. “I feel like I just keep setting good, healthy goals that are right in front of me, and just do that, rather than comparing myself to an artist who’s been doing this for ten years, making me wonder why I’m not there yet.” Success isn’t a destination, but rather a fact of his reality that he lives every day. “If I get to make music for the rest of my life, then that’s a successful life for me. I keep my expectations low – everything else is a bonus. I just constantly keep trying to come back to why I love music, and how it makes me feel.”