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Feb 28, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Camille Blake

Julia Holter is releasing a new album, Something in the Room She Moves, on March 22 via Domino. Now she has shared its third single, “Evening Mood,” via a music video. Dicky Bahto directed the video. Watch it below.

When working on “Evening Mood,” Holter was inspired by the Studio Ghibli film Ponyo, which was her daughter’s favorite movie at the time. The Japanese animated film from 2008 is about a fish that can transform into a girl and befriends a human boy (it was directed by Hayao Miyazaki).

“I was inspired by the transformability of creatures, and how this malleability works alongside our capacity for love. I wanted everything to feel very liquid,” Holter says in a press release.

The song features a “heavily filtered ultrasound heartbeat” that was sent through a phaser. “I wanted it to sound like it was inside the body,” says Holter.

“There’s a corporeal focus, inspired by the complexity and transformability of our bodies,” she says of the new album. “I was trying to create a world that’s fluid-sounding, water-like, evoking the body’s internal sound world.”

The album’s title was in part inspired by The Beatles song “Something” and its lyrics, “Something in the way she moves.” Holter, a lifelong Beatles fan, has been singing Beatles songs to her daughter at night.

Something in the Room She Moves features “Sun Girl,” a new song Holter shared in November that was one of our Songs of the Week. When the album was announced, she shared its second single, “Spinning,” via a music video. “Spinning” was also one of our Songs of the Week.

Something in the Room She Moves is the follow-up to Aviary, her last regular new album, released six years ago. It was our Album of the Week and made the Top 10 in our Top 100 Albums of 2018 list.

Since then she has kept busy, including composing the score for Eliza Hittman’s 2020 film Never Rarely Sometimes Always and working with England’s Chorus of Opera North on a new live soundtrack to the 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, which Holter wrote and performed. She’s also recently worked with Call Super, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, and Max Tundra.

Read our rave review of Aviary.

Read our interview with Julia Holter on Aviary.

Read our 2015 interview with Holter.

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