ALBUM REVIEW · JULIA HOLTER
Materia: the offcuts make their case
Seven tracks from the Something in the Room She Moves sessions, two new shapes for its best song. A study that keeps turning into an album.
BY JOLT STAFF · AUG 21 2026 · 3 min read
4/5 · STRONG — THE JOLT VERDICT: One song becomes seven, and none of them repeat.
The premise sounds like housekeeping. Materia gathers what Julia Holter could not fit on Something in the Room She Moves, her 2024 album, and rebuilds its title song twice. Companion records are usually where B sides go to feel important. This one makes a sharper argument: a finished song is still raw material, and reworking it is writing, not recycling.
The two new Materias carry the case. “Materia 2” is the strangest thing here, a slow hallucination of drum machine, fretless bass and clarinet, Jessika Kenney’s voice circling Holter’s until you stop tracking whose is whose. “Materia 3” closes the record slower still, the harmony finally given the room she always heard for it. The melody grew out of her Hildegard von Bingen listening. It survives every arrangement she puts it through, which is the point.
The rest moves quickly for art pop. “The Laugh Is in the Eyes” opens jazzy and light on its feet. “My Lost One” drifts like a girl group slowed to fog. “Clepsydra” lasts two minutes, develops nothing and works anyway. The center is “My Twin,” ten minutes of improvisation she later mined for the single “Fantasy.” Hearing the source after the single is the album’s best trick. It plays like being handed the negative of a photograph you already know.
The complaint is scale. Thirty-four minutes built around one song’s harmony can feel like a study, and anyone who skipped Something will miss half the context. A few passages thin out or simply stop once they reach the shape she wants, and you can hear the seam.
Keep it anyway. This is the rare offcuts record with a thesis, and the thesis holds: nothing here repeats, including the song that appears twice. A 4 for the nerve as much as the songs.
…her cresting voice and blue Wurlitzer hosting games of harmonic hide-and-seek.
— DOMINO, ON THE ORIGINAL “MATERIA”
The tracklist
- The Laugh Is in the Eyes — 4:38
- My Lost One — 5:16
- Fantasy — 3:54
- Materia 2 — 4:48
- Clepsydra — 2:18
- My Twin — 10:16
- Materia 3 — 3:34