This raw and personal approach to the lyrics is present throughout Derealization. I wrote every song from that place and gained the confidence I was pretending to possess.” The song ‘Forgive Me’ is the apology I wanted to say and to hear.
I forgave myself and in turn forgave those around me. “Honestly, I kinda lost it, and through making this record I made peace with it and reconciled myself as a real person. Like you we're just playing a character,” Kugel says of her headspace leading up to the creation of Derealization. “You know how touring musicians often speak of whether home is real or tour is real? Well, it can lead you to lose grasp on ‘reality,’ especially when touring is taken away and you are left to wonder if anything was ever real, including yourself.
The album finds Julia playing almost all the instruments and taking her first stab at engineering at COMA, her and her husband's home recording studio in Long Beach, CA. Moody, dark, and sumptuous, the record is a flow chart of Julia Kugel coming into herself as an artist and songwriter. Vocal layering and abstract instrumentation convey a blurred desperation to connect to an emotional and psychological focal point. This juxtaposition of nebulousness and lucidity gives the album a sense of clarity emerging from the haze, an apt refection of Kugel's personal growth and journey toward self-acceptance.ĭerealization is based on weaving the unreal, unsaid, and unknown into an undulating sonic fabric. The album traverses a landscape of ethereal folk, atmospheric deconstructed pop, and dubbed-out country ballads, all centered around straight forward and direct lyrics. Steeped in the beguiling pop elements of her past work, Derealization is a meditative deep dive into the mind of a person struggling to understand a crumbling internal and external world. On her first solo full-length album Derealization, Kugel shifts her focus from collaboration and band dynamics towards a singular artistic vision and private self-discovery.
This is the crucial question at the core of Julia, Julia, the moniker for Julia Kugel, founding member of garage punk icons The Coathangers and the dream pop duo Soft Palms. If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust? Debut Solo Album From Julia Kugel (The Coathangers).