Julia Cumming will release her debut solo album Julia on 24th April 2026 via Partisan Records.
Best known as a founding member of Sunflower Bean, Cumming has long been central to the band’s songwriting, production instincts and visual identity. With Julia, she steps fully into her own frame, drawing on 70s soft pop while filtering those influences through a contemporary lens.
The album was recorded over six weeks in Los Angeles alongside collaborator Brian Robert Jones and producer and engineer Chris Coady, whose CV includes work with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV On The Radio, Grizzly Bear and Beach House.
The studio band features Garrett Ray on drums, Roger Joseph Manning Jr. on keys and Nick Zinner contributing guitar to two tracks. The result is polished without being pristine, melodic without tipping into nostalgia.
Cumming frames the record as a conscious rejection of external expectation. “I think we all try to play into the roles that other people put on us, or that we put on ourselves, in the hopes of being accepted,” she explains. “To use this music as a way out of those external narratives is my dream.”
She describes Julia as “the ultimate anti-cool album”, aiming for joy rather than detachment. It is, she says, “a joyous space for the misfits, and in particular, an album for girls like me, the ones in middle school who never fit into a neat little box.”
New single ‘My Life’ offers the first full glimpse. Positioned as the album’s opening statement, it captures a pivot point after years of touring and writing under pressure. “It was liberation,” Cumming notes. “It’s clear ‘My Life’ would open the album, because it’s the thesis. The seed that started everything.”
The track arrives with a video directed by Edgar Wright, shot during a London winter and revealing a more intimate side of her persona.
Julia Cumming plays London’s Moth Club on 12th May 2026.
Julia lands on 24th April 2026.
