Julinko
Naebula
Maple Death
Julinko has a big voice. It’s big to the point where it can credibly compared with icons like Björk, Sinead O’Connor and Elizabeth Fraser, and big enough that even if her new Naebula album was a wholly acapella effort, it would still make for a compelling listen. To her credit, however, the Italian artist—who has previously described her aesthetic as “dream doom”—has learned how to effectively bolster her pipes, and on Naebula she does that with the help of cathedral-ready drones, reverb-drenched guitars and undulating textures that wouldn’t have been out of place on an old Silver Apples record.
There’s some crunchy distortion in there as well (“Unreal,” “Throw Ashes!”), but many of the LP’s best moments are those in which Julinko embraces a sense of celestial oblivion. On “Kiss the Lion’s Tongue,” for instance, her emotive caterwauls float atop a foggy wall of sound that’s part Mogwai and part Portishead, while the soaring “Samadhi” feels like a noisy church hymn and the standout “Jeanne De Rien” sounds like a Renaissance-fair romp being reinterpreted by Joy Division. Julinko is far from the first artist to embrace the idea of beautiful noise, but in an era that’s lousy with shoegaze soundalikes and lukewarm rehashings of the 4AD catalog, she’s delivered something that feels both sonically potent and emotionally immediate.