julie

julie remember the night they realized things had changed. It was their first show back after the pandemic, at an art gallery on the outskirts of LA proper. Before lockdown, the trio  — Alexandria Elizabeth on vocals and bass, Keyan Pourzand on vocals and guitar, Dillon Lee on drums — were used to playing for peers and friends. Now, they rolled up to their show and a line of people stretched around the block. Afterwards, the band was thronged with kids their age, looking to meet them, to talk about their music, take pictures. “I remember having horrible anxiety after because it’s like nothing you have experienced before, and it was totally unexpected,” Elizabeth admits. Something was happening around julie.

Anyone in julie’s position would’ve been a bit shell-shocked, considering the band’s humble origins. The genesis of the group went back a few years, to the late ‘10s, when high school friends Lee and Pourzand decided to form a band after watching local acts around their hometown in Orange County. But as the two gravitated towards more shadowy and adventurous music, they felt out of place with the straight-up indie and punk around them. They reached out to Elizabeth, a musician they’d seen around and thought might be a kindred spirit. After Elizabeth’s addition as a second vocalist and bassist, julie’s lineup solidified. They had a simple goal back then: play one single show, and the project will be a success.

Still in their late teens, julie soon decamped to Los Angeles when Elizabeth and Pourzand enrolled in architecture school. As they continued to pursue the band in LA, their sense of possibility expanded. Fueled by the abundant inspiration around them in a newly adopted home more legible to the band, julie began working on songs destined for their debut album, my anti-aircraft friend.

That was back in 2019, and first julie would have to traverse a long, strange journey across the ensuing five years. Just before lockdown hit, the band completed recording a debut single called “flutter.” “We just wanted a thousand listens so it wasn’t embarrassing,” Pourzand remembers drily. Instead, the song soon racked up tens of millions of streams. A whirlwind developed around julie, that initial post-pandemic show in LA just the first taste of a sold-out American tour even when they’d barely released any music. Eventually, in the waning days of summer 2021, they released the EP pushing daisies, and followed it in 2022 with the double single “pg. 4 a picture of three hedges” and “through your window.” The fervor around them only continued to grow.

The flipside of burgeoning success and attention was a new level of stress around completing music. “There’s always pressure,” Lee says of the internal dynamics the band experienced as they rapidly accrued fans and, with them, expectations.

Yet even now, with the trio still in their early twenties, julie was well-suited to navigate the process. All three members are multi-disciplinary artists — in addition to their design background, Pourzand does sculpture work and Elizabeth writes and paints, while Lee is also a painter as well as illustrator. The band deliberates and conceives every element of their releases, not just the music therein but the art and packaging, all the way down to what instruments they play onstage. “We’re trying to build a thick fog of emotion,” Pourzand explains.

“We don’t want to be purely looked at as a band, but more so as an art collective,” Lee adds, detailing not just the holistic approach julie takes to their music, but also their visions of completely unrelated art projects in the future.

Unsurprisingly, julie’s process is an exacting one, but what that mean was my anti-aircraft friend’s half-decade gestation traced the band’s evolution from earlier days, when their music was still derived from the exhilaration of teenage discovery, to now. Their debut album is a bold leap, both showcasing a louder, more assured band, while also attaining a core sound the band had been chasing all along. After all those years tinkering, my anti-aircraft friend is the work of people who have become steeped in alternative music’s history, learned how it works within their own  musical sensibilities, and now use it to warp conventions and turn tropes on their head.

“Sonically, we were trying to concentrate our vision, but make it more visceral,” Elizabeth says. Working with producer [INSERT NAME], julie recorded my anti-aircraft friend live in the room, realizing they got the best sound by capturing the unique interplay between the three of them as musicians. Now well-seasoned on the road, the julie of my anti-aircraft friend is one that is more roiling, gnarlier, and noisier than the one we first knew.

“It’s us becoming more vulnerable, and more accurate with the emotional expression,” Lee says. “Some of the songs in the earlier days are a bit more guarded or timid. Now we’re more confident in what we want to do.”

Fans will still recognize the shoegaze influence from julie’s initial releases, but that’s now been fused with a host of other experimental guitar influences from throughout pop history, much of the record running on a ferocity and coated in a scuzziness as related to grunge as anything else. Throughout, Lee’s drums thrash underneath as Pourzand and Elizabeth contrast and meld their voices. Following pre-release track “catalogue,” lead single “clairbourne practice” finds them using that trick to strong effect, two narrators close to understanding the other but not quite getting there. “It’s two people saying the exact same thing but still not hearing each other,” Elizabeth explains.

Raw, hard-to-parse emotional territory has always been the thematic lifeblood of julie’s music. That’s truer than ever on my anti-aircraft friend. While the band stop short of fully unpacking the album’s evocative title, Lee alludes to “an unhealthy bond that is weighing you down, something you know it’s bad to have this deep connection to.” Much of the album has a similarly mesmeric character: the band inviting you to stare into dark corners with them, before trying to purge whatever’s waiting there. In the multi-part journey of “very little effort” or the volcanic choruses of “feminine adornments” alike, julie slither and surge through loud-soft dynamics, both representing the turmoil within and trying to burn it away.

That tension is, of course, a classic element of the genre that first bonded the three members of julie together. Much has been made of the new wave of shoegaze, and what the younger generation might seek in the work of their forebears: the balance of accessibility and aggression, limitless exploration of an instrument’s boundaries, a sound that is both ethereal and intimate. For listeners who came of age amidst global pandemics, tumultuous political climates, and a host of looming natural and social crises, the sound of a band like julie could equally be a cathartic escape, or a shelter in which to locate a better sense of self-acceptance in a precarious world.

For as much as the band themselves think over each new creative decision, however, that larger meaning only reveals itself later. “Every song, EP, or album is just how we feel in the moment,” Pourzand says. “This is our life. This is our experience.”