Julia Holter has never been content to leave a song alone. Across a career spent blurring the boundaries between experimental composition and pop, she has built elaborate musical worlds, then found ways to unsettle them. On Materia, that impulse turns inward: old ideas are revisited, familiar structures loosen, and music becomes something fluid, open to revision.
On this episode of If It Be Your Will, Holter traces the path from her early experiments and studies in composition to the increasingly expansive, emotionally intricate records that followed. We talk about orchestration as a way of thinking, the strange relationship between control and intuition, and what changes when you stop treating a composition as a finished thing.
A companion to Something in the Room She Moves, Materia finds Holter continuing to question how music takes shape — and what might emerge when you return to it with fresh ears. Our conversation moves through creative uncertainty, the long life of an idea, and the possibilities that appear when you let a piece become something you didn't originally imagine.
Sometimes the most revealing way forward is to take things apart.
