Julia Jacklin has announced her fourth studio album The Gem, due 25th September via 4AD, alongside lead single ‘Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)’.
The album marks Jacklin’s debut release on 4AD, having previously released three records on Polyvinyl and Transgressive. It follows Pre Pleasure (2022), which earned award nominations for Best Solo Artist, Best Independent Release and Best Adult Contemporary Album. The gap between albums was shaped by circumstance and then by choice: Jacklin came out of contract, parted ways with her management and, for the first time since she started out, found herself with no industry expectations and no one asking what was next. “It was liberating and it was scary,” she has said.
The album takes its name from a bar in Collingwood, Melbourne, that Jacklin had discovered when she first moved to the city from Sydney in 2017. She had not known many people in Melbourne then and had used the pub as a way of forcing herself into the city’s social life. Eight years later, she returned to make her record there. She called her old friend Robert Muinos, owner of Rat Shack Studios, which sits directly above The Gem, assembled a band of friends including guitarist Jacob Diamond, bassist Mimi Gilbert and drummer Jess Elwood, and settled in for what was meant to be two weeks. The sessions stretched to nearly a year.
They worked in converted hotel rooms above the pub, constrained by its residential licence from recording late into the night, with sound bleed from a neighbouring hairdresser and the noise of live bands from below. They played two unannounced shows at The Gem to test the songs before committing them to tape. On the final day, the four of them got matching tattoos: a small circle representing an opal, inked by one of the bar’s staff. “It did really feel like we’d done something special together,” Jacklin has said.
The album’s thematic core is the tension between wanting to love and wanting to be free, a question Jacklin describes as central to her life. Lead single ‘Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)’ is a bold piece of 1980s-inflected jangle rock, a departure from the more introspective sound of Pre Pleasure and a clear signal that the album covers new ground.
Jacklin will preview material at a short UK and Irish in-store tour later this month, before a wider North American, UK and European tour running from October 2026 through 2027, including a London show at the Eventim Apollo on 19th February 2027.
In-store dates:
29 Jun – Resident, Brighton
30 Jun – Rough Trade East, London
2 Jul – Jacaranda, Liverpool
3 Jul – Rough Trade, Nottingham
