QSC Aspiring Interview: Julia-Sophie on 'Forgive Too Slow'

Anglo-French electronica artist Julia-Sophie at one point wanted nothing more to do with music — the demise of her band Little Fish, who supported the likes of Courtney Love and Juliette Lewis, left her needing therapy and traumatised by a relentless industry and scathing NME reviews. Many years later, she started making minimal electronic songs with her soft-spoken vocals, and we now find her playlisted by the likes of Lauren Laverne and her vinyl stocks completely sold out with the release of her debut album, forgive too slow.

Not only did Julia-Sophie walk away from being signed to an international major label deal with Universal while in Little Fish, but the accompanying lifestyle even saw her travelling in limousines and helicopters. Lavishness aside, the band secured some huge support slots in their 2006-2012 runtime, including Eagles of Death Metal, Juliette Lewis, Alice in Chains, and Courtney Love’s band, Hole.

Some reading this may be dumbfounded at the notion of wanting to give all this up, but Julia-Sophie has said of the experience, “I didn’t care enough about being famous to survive all the shit that was being thrown at me.” There were juxtaposing situations where she was left to work in environments where she didn’t feel safe, and the highs and lows of the experience left her feeling isolated from the thing she was in it for, to begin with — the music.

Julia-Sophie found herself at a crossroads: move to Los Angeles and live a glitzy but inauthentic life, or move back to Oxford. Choosing the latter, her innate creativity began to gradually come up as she immersed herself in her local scene: writing poetry for magazines, starting a cassette label, and synth-pop band Candy Says who, despite no lofty ambitions for the group, ended up contributing music to a Netflix film, Close. It was 2020 when the first solo Julia-Sophie music came, with the debut single xOx.

Julia-Sophie, who has lived in Oxford almost her entire life except for short periods in Lyon with the French part of her family, begins by talking about her musical lineage: "My French granddad was a prisoner of war, and wrote songs in prison. He wrote a songbook and his cellmate illustrated the songs. The book is in a library somewhere in France. He was also a very good whistler and would whistle on the radio! When my mother was in school in France, she would write songs in class — she actually got in trouble for it. She wrote songs for other people. But when she came to England, she kind of left all that behind and became a teacher."

Julia-Sophie delves a little deeper into why her time in Little Fish became completely unsustainable for her, and why she had to leave before it became too late. "It was very old-school, old-fashioned. We worked really hard, played gigs, got signed to Universal, went to America, and got a lot of money. It was the dream. We toured the world, played with famous bands, and had limousines and helicopters. It was crazy, but there was a dark side to it. It didn't end well, and it destroyed me.

“I left the industry for a while because I was so broken. There's a lot of dark stuff in the entertainment industry. People are starting to talk about it more, and there are more secrets coming out. I think it's good that people are talking about it. Back then, you couldn't talk to anyone about it. Things are changing, and people are listening. It was really tough and horrible behind the glitz and glamour. I couldn't talk about it, but now I've done therapy and worked on myself, so it's really helped."

With all this said, it’s perhaps easier to understand why Julia-Sophie went from a big, indie rock sound with a huge accompanying lifestyle, to now making the very DIY, lo-fi minimalist sounds with just-audible vocals we know now. With such a stark change in lifestyle, it might almost be strange if she had tried to keep making the music from that time.

One of the things that make Julia-Sophie such a fascinating character is that, with each music release, she insists it will be her last and that she’s done with the music industry, and often strongly considers not releasing her EPs or albums after making them. There does seem to be some creative force willing her forwards despite her reluctance from the years of bad experiences she had.

“It took being nudged by a very close friend of mine who said, ‘This music's really good. You should release it,’” she explains. “They truly believed in me and wanted me to release it. If not for them, I don't think I would have released my first EP. And then, with the album, having released three EPs, I hesitated to release the album because I thought, ‘If I haven't got any record label at this point, or anybody who wants to fund a release, should I be self-releasing? Why am I doing this?’

“Funnily enough, Ba Da Bing Records had bought my first EP on Bandcamp. I recognised the name because I was a big fan of Lady Lamb and other albums he’d released. Ben (Goldberg, the label’s owner) said to me, ‘Send me your EPs, and maybe we can release them.’ And then I didn’t send him my EPs because of my lack of confidence. 

"I thought, ‘He’s not going to like it. I’m just going to get rejected. I can’t deal with it.’ And then I did end up sending him the album. The album spent probably about seven months in my Dropbox, and I thought, ‘I’m never going to release this.’ And then he emailed me and said, “Hey, let’s release your record. Let’s put it on vinyl.’”

Thank goodness Julia-Sophie did release her first EPs, which showcase some of her strongest material. 2021’s heartbroken </3, for example, put her on many people’s radars, particularly thanks to the captivating cctv, and the six-minute evolving masterpiece i wish, which builds to a stunning climax as she repeats ‘I wish I felt better’.

These four-track releases laid the ground both practically and sonically for her debut album, forgive too slow. Perhaps unsurprising given how she’s spoken of her experience of the industry and her much lower-stakes approach to her solo output, her original intention for the LP was to release it and then walk away from music completely. But that was before all copies of the vinyl sold out and the general fantastic reaction to it. Thank goodness she is now reconsidering, as it’s a record that has the feel of an artist just getting started and still having so much more to offer.

One of its singles, telephone, is yet another fascinating example of Julia-Sophie’s music having a propulsive will of its own. It’s a song that, like the album itself, she was unsure about releasing for years. And yet it secured some brilliant national radio spots, not least of which being on Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6 Music breakfast show.

“That song had an interesting journey,” she says. “I always knew telephone was probably going to be one of my most commercial, more traditional, and not as intense as I Wish or as experimental. It’s one of the first solo songs I recorded, and I kept holding it back for two or three years. I wanted to establish myself as an electronic artist because it was a new world for me. I worried that if I released the telephone first, I wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

Perhaps Julia-Sophie’s counter-intuitive approach is an act of genius, seeing as telephone is also now her most-streamed song and a big part of the album’s success. She’s correct to identify this as over-thinking — while the song is perhaps her catchiest, its hard to imagine its dreamy bed of wobbly analogue synths and beats blaring out at Radio 1’s Big Weekend or somewhere similar.

forgive too slow yielded two other singles — first up was numb, a track Julia-Sophie was much more comfortable releasing with almost inaudible vocal delivery, and sparsely minimal electronica. The payoff as the song slowly builds is stunning, and its lyrics are deeply confessional. The most recent was wishful thinking, a conversely euphoric track with a blissful arpeggiator and singalong backing vocals playing off against the usual whispered vocals.

Regarding the album’s release, she says “I’m over the moon. I was ready to quit. I hadn’t done any shows for two years and hadn’t released anything for over a year. I wasn’t expecting it. I don’t know what I was expecting. I was just happy it was out! I got a two-page spread in Electronic Sound magazine and the Quietus, I did some sold-out gigs. I couldn’t have hoped for anything better. 

"I wasn’t out there gigging, touring, posting about my breakfast on Instagram and TikTok, and explaining how I made all the music. I sometimes question what we really have to do as musicians to make people listen. Maybe I was lucky. I didn’t want to be sat at home with a pile of vinyl that I couldn’t give away. So I feel really, really lucky.”

When asked what the saying ‘play out loud’ means for her, Julia-Sophie says, “The thing that came up for me was, we're only as strong as our weakest link. We can play out loud, but there's also a softness in there — It's not just about being loud. There's the polarity or the opposite for one to exist. Loud is not always the biggest strength. Being silent or grounded can also give you support and anchor you to be loud in your strengths.”

And thus, the Julia-Sophie musical story continues moving forward — there is new music on the way, and a London headline show on the 21st November at Next Door Records Two. It’s a fascinating story of music finding a way against the odds, and you can listen to that story now in forgive too slow.

Photographer: Siobhan Cox