Julia Holter’s latest album ends with a ghostly solo meditation: only a warm-bath Wurlitzer, a reverb-speckled vocal, and some evocative descriptions of love. “Emptiness, the dagger it hides / Placing full importance in you,” she sings, her drowsy voice filling the chasms between chords. At that moment, you might wonder if you’re listening to a defective master—on “Materia 3,” the art-pop artist is pitch-shifted way down, heightening the mystery of an already-enigmatic track. And that choice highlights two key points about Materia: The pull of Holter’s unadorned voice can stop you cold all on its own, but she’s also not afraid to manipulate her instrument in surprising ways. Vocals are the nucleus of Materia, a deliberate companion and pseudo-sequel to Holter’s 2024 LP, Something in the Room She Moves. But the arrangements are still richly constructed, built here around shifting landscapes of gurgling fretless bass, gentle woodwinds, and icy keys. Her band fully blooms on opener “The Laugh Is in the Eyes,” a song somehow both fidgety and calm, disjointed and effortless, with silky clarinets and synth pads draped over a 5/8 rhythm that Holter previously described as “loopy.” That same tapestry continues with “My Lost One,” which rides filtered fretless and muted keyboard arpeggios to a similar space, swelling into a climax with a disorienting accelerando. It almost sounds like five tracks playing at once, and Holter’s singing snakes around the calming chaos—at times stair-stepping skyward in staccato, elsewhere easing into an ASMR whisper so intimate you can sense the microphone. “Fantasy” also feels like a collage but for different reasons—halfway through, its ambient drip-drop electronics abruptly shift, with Holter’s voice probing against saxophones and bass in rhythms that feel cinematically out of sync. Even at its most experimental, this opening trilogy gives Materia a more structured foundation—solid footing before the next four songs slip even further into the abstract and avant-garde. With its swirling, processed vocals and washed-out MIDI mellotron, “Clepsydra” sounds like Laurie Anderson covering King Crimson’s “The Power to Believe,” and Holter’s sleepy melodies saunter around a MIDI music box and Prophet-6 during the 10-minute solo improv “My Twin.” “Materia 2” and “Materia 3” refine the same piece from Something in the Room She Moves but sound almost nothing alike. The former reimagines its skeletal arrangement as a leisurely stroll through forests of icicles, her voice rustling around clarinet, minimalist drum machine, and fretless harmonics. The second, a manipulation of the original recording, is envisioned as a hat-tip to the long-lost era of CD bonus tracks. But it isn’t merely padding—the slow-motion atmosphere stretches out the drama even further than the Something take. Given its origins as a companion album and its relatively brief length (seven total songs), you might categorize Materia as a postscript. But it has gravity of its own. This is a substantial, beautifully strange work—listening to it feels like walking into a living room that’s been redecorated without you knowing. [Domino] Ryan Reed is a writer and editor from Knoxville, Tennessee. In addition to Paste, his work has appeared over the years in Rolling Stone, Revolver, The New York Times, Pitchfork, and many other publications.