The story of Sarah Julia is one of pure partnership, bound together by shared years, life experiences, style, and sisterhood: the duo are bonded way beyond their musical endeavours. Their creative beginnings go way back to when Sarah was eight, and Julia was six, and they were both in theatre together – a constant outlet across their lives. Julia recounts being in the audience, sitting so far forward on her seat when watching Sarah perform that she fell and knocked her tooth out, a very literal moment of realisation that she wanted to be on stage too.
Throughout their formative years, the pair took on roles in professional musicals, TV shows, and movies, before participating in a TV songwriting contest where they came in third place. After a long time of telling other people’s stories, Sarah Julia decided it was time to tell their own, and through whittling away what they didn’t like, they in turn discovered what they did. With time, Sarah Julia have gradually carved out their desired path as artists and writers.
A defining moment in the siblings’ lives came when there was a significant change in their family dynamics, and through this they reached a new level of intimacy and sincerity in their songwriting. From this experience they recognise that “it clicked, it was the first domino”. Their stance became one of reminiscence, reflecting on childhood, growing up, loss, family, and change. Together with Jasper Maekelberg, the pair developed a way of lyrically and sonically blurring the lines between the security and softness of childhood, and the heaviness of adulthood. With the lightness of acoustic guitar pickings and harp married with the dark depths of double bass and cello, they translate the confusing world of young adulthood. With some songs sung in unison, their two voices truly move as one, splitting the duties of professing their shared experiences in song.
While writing their debut EP How Do We Go Back To Being Normal?, Sarah Julia found themselves creating in the midst of grief, and in turn, aimed to capture that time of their lives. Treating their period of writing as a sort of time capsule, they finished every new song as quickly as possible to act as a snapshot of that particular moment. Sarah Julia took three years to write, record and fine tune their debut EP, and as such, have documented both their progress and retrogression. On returning to those oldest songs on the tracklist, they shared: “The words still felt relevant and it felt like we were teleported back in time. When recording ‘Thoughtless Man’ it scared us how much it still hurt to sing those words out loud, it felt like time had not done its job properly, it was only afterwards that we felt relief. This song, like the others, had to be recorded for us to move on and start a new chapter”.
Lovers of open tunings and artists such as Phoebe Bridgers, Adrianne Lenker and Joni Mitchell, the duo rely on their music as a vehicle to look inward but also as a method to travel beyond themselves. Recalling their home of Rotterdam in The Netherlands, and musing on childhood hiking memories upon the Scottish mountain range on ‘Cairngorms’, they share, “In our songs we try to find peace with change, growing up and (self) acceptance. In a world where people are constantly shouting, we tried to find our voice and a new meaning of family. We feel very connected to these songs as they represent a big change in both of our lives”.
The EP echoes sounds of indie-folk both past and future, at its centre is a solid foundation of acoustic guitar, strongly spearheaded by their two voiced harmonies. With an all female band, Sarah Julia celebrate the power that comes with handling the male-dominated music world together, and strive to showcase the vulnerability and personal connection that lives in their music. In their efforts to keep this EP organic and pure, Sarah Julia have endeavoured to make a project that can undoubtedly transcend time.
