Julia Jacklin has made a name for herself as one of Australia’s most internationally celebrated songwriters, with nominations at both the ARIA and Libera Awards, sold-out shows globally, massive tours, appearing on major festival stages from Glastonbury to Pitchfork, Newport Folk to Primavera, with countless accolades for her critically acclaimed albums.

After touring flat-out for years on three beloved releases, Julia found herself at home out of contract with her record label, looking for a new manager. “For the first time since I started out, I had this big chunk of time without any industry expectations and no-one to ask me what was going on,” she remembers. “It was liberating and it was scary.” Jacklin wanted to do things intentionally this time around. She wanted to back herself. And she wanted to make the record at home in Melbourne: something she’d never done before.

“I want to love and be loved, but I also want to feel free. The tension between those two things has been the central question of my life,” Julia says. This is the theme that underpins her fourth album The Gem.

When Julia first moved to Melbourne from Sydney in 2017, she discovered a little bar called The Gem on a back street in Collingwood, where bands pushed dining tables to the side and set up in a corner on the floor.

“The Gem felt like a metaphor for the whole process, because a lot of it did feel like digging. I felt like I was almost doing it in the dark, just trusting that I was going to find something,” says Jacklin of the record, which conjures images of excavation, of reinvention, of trusting your instincts and surrounding yourself with the people and things that make life worthwhile. It’s a soaring document of the songwriter’s journey back to herself.