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Julia Jacklin Named Her New Album After the Melbourne Pub She Recorded It In

The Gem arrives September 25, 2026, and it's the rare album title that's also a return address.

Most fourth albums get named for a lyric, a feeling, a vague gesture at reinvention. Julia Jacklin went a different route: she named hers after the building she was standing in. The Gem is a pub in Melbourne, and it's also the room above that pub, and now it's the title of the record she made up there. That's not a metaphor doing a lot of heavy lifting — it's just where the microphones were.

The bigger structural news is the label. The Gem is Jacklin's first release on 4AD, arriving under an exclusive license from Jacklin herself, which tells you this isn't a full imprint handover so much as a targeted partnership for this record. For an artist who's spent three albums building an audience independently, a first outing on a label with 4AD's reputation for texture and specificity is the kind of move that reframes how a fourth album gets heard, before a single note plays.

## A Room Above a Pub, Not a Studio Complex

Jacklin co-produced The Gem herself, working with Robert Muinos at Rat Shack Studios in Melbourne — her home base, which matters here in a literal sense, not a biographical flourish. The record was made above The Gem, the pub, which means the album's title isn't a wink at a lyric or a mood board word; it's the actual location, sitting right there in the credits if you know to look. There's something almost stubbornly unglamorous about naming your 4AD debut after a pub you recorded above rather than a poetic phrase, and that plainness is its own kind of statement of intent.

The lead single is Get Away From Me (I Think I'll Love You Soon), a title that does the thing good song titles do: it argues with itself in real time. Whatever the song sounds like, the title alone is doing contradiction as a structural device, which is a very specific kind of songwriting instinct to lead with.

## Ten Tracks, One Guest Spot

The Gem runs ten tracks, opening with Brand New and God Sometimes — a pairing that reads like a thesis statement before you've heard a chord, newness and faith placed shoulder to shoulder right out of the gate. The middle of the record moves through The Hardest Thing into Angel Vision and Real Life, a sequence that suggests an album more interested in earned transitions than a string of standalone singles. It closes on I Wish, track ten, which is also the album's only outside collaboration: The Maes join Jacklin there, making it the single feature on an otherwise solo-credited record. Save the one guest spot for the closing track and you're making a choice about how the album ends, not just who's on it. Before that, track eight and nine — You Turned On The Tap and Walk On Me — sit as a back-to-back pair with a shared vocabulary of hands and water, whether or not that's intentional.

For a niche audience that still buys vinyl on release day, the format list is worth pausing on: The Gem comes on Green Opal Vinyl, Standard Black Vinyl, and CD. Green opal isn't a default pressing choice — it's the kind of variant decision that signals a label and artist thinking about the record as a physical object worth collecting, not just a streaming date. Combined with a first-ever 4AD release, it's the sort of detail that tends to matter more to the people who preorder within the first week than to anyone else, which is exactly the audience a niche release like this is built to reward.

What's left unresolved, deliberately or not, is the space between title and record. An album called The Gem, made above a bar of the same name, on a new label, with one guest voice saved for the very last track — that's a lot of small, specific decisions pointing in a consistent direction. Whether they add up to a cohesive statement or just a well-chosen set of details is the kind of question a tracklist can gesture at but never answer on its own.

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