Heavy and raw emotions are at the centre of American julie's songs. The trio stare into dark corners with their listeners before their indie rock songs attempt to erase what waits in the darkness.

In September, they released their debut album my anti-aircraft friend, which still has shoegaze inspiration, but also experimental guitar riffs from almost all of pop history, topped with a lot of ferocity and scratchy grunge touches.

The ten songs trace the band's evolution over the past five years, from when the music was born out of teenage excitement at discovering new things to now, when the band has confidently landed in the sound they've been chasing. Music media Pitchfork gave the album 8.1 out of ten and music blog Stereogum selected it as album of the week.

On the second single from the album, "clairbourne practice", Julie lets two voices that are unable to understand each other collide. They say the following about the song in their press material:

"The way the vocals are layered on top of each other in this song is maybe the most androgynous on the album. But it's two people saying the same thing and still not hearing each other. We definitely wanted the loud and quiet parts to be polar opposites. Sweet, then destructive, and coming back and repeating the cycle."

julie had their real breakthrough after the pandemic, releasing the pushing daisies EP in 2021 and the double single "pg. 4 a picture of three hedges" and "through your window" in 2022. The band has played support for Alex G and Faye Webster.

All movement – and consequently, a lot of art – is a product of tension and release. In 2017, when multi-instrumentalists Nina Cates and Zack James decided to begin writing songs together, it was an exercise to see whether they could collaborate and anyone would be interested in anything they came up with.

Now, Robber Robber’s debut album, Wild Guess, feels more like an exercise in tension and release than an indie record. For all of its nods to its post-punk predecessors and the eclectic Burlington, VT music scene that fed into it, the album feels more like an attempt to translate imagery into sound, communicating all the shades of light and dark you could visualize.