Julia Jacklin’s 2016 debut, Don’t Let the Kids Win, is a remarkably clear-eyed chronicle of the unease and uncertainty of being in your 20s.
“I had a life in my head/I’d be pushing up that hill until those toes bled,” the Australian singer/songwriter laments in “Coming of Age,” one of the record’s fuzzed-out rockers. “Now I gotta learn this new stage.”
Jacklin was 23 when she started writing the songs on Kids. She’s 27 now, with a slew of glowing reviews under her belt and a tour schedule full of venues that hold three- and four-figure audiences. What a difference a few years makes.
“There was a really scary period [in there],” she says from a tour stop in England. “I was playing in Sydney for five years before I made the album, and I made the album without a label or a manager or any contact with the industry at all. I came home and I had zero idea what to do with it. I had no clue. I was just kind of hoping someone would email me.”