Dropping Julia win you over with their enchanting new EP Biggest Fan — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
On this followup to their 2022 album Stranger, the Virginia quintet fronted by a Jersey girl lean into their jazzier side, peppering their headnoddingly funky grooves and classic poppy melodies with plenty of complex chords and freewheeling sax lines — all the better to support singer Jules’ dreamy, creamy, and playfully personable vocals. The result: Songs that can hold their own at the pop festival and the jazz club, channeling the sweet sounds of the ’70s without seeming dated, derivative or gimmicky. Plus, they put an energetic, inspired new spin on the overworked samba classic The Girl From Ipanema.
Born in the ’90s into the bustling, gritty state of New Jersey, Jules set out as a teen, carrying the nostalgia of home from coast to coast, from wild seashores to eccentric towns, and across the pond to the dimly lit cities and countryside of Europe. Bearing her guitar, she bashfully strummed and honestly sang the poems from inside her journal — scribbled down in cafes in the East Village, beatnik cooperatives in California, farms in Western Ireland.
Her adventures, experiences and serendipitous connections bled their way into books full of songs that candidly express female struggles, sorrow, inner battles, nightmares, loss, troublesome love, crowded and anonymous subway trains, the restless twilight of a sleepless night, longing for that mysterious human connection, and the search for magic.
Eventually landing in the rolling Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, she teamed up with the boys to create Dropping Julia — a quintet breathing life into Jules’ personal and imaginative songwriting. Together they create a technicolor mixture — part dreamy, dusky and melancholy, part funky and sassy — with influences from R&B, jazz, funk and pop — that invites the listener in and bewitchingly delivers the evocative stories and emotion in Jules’ writing.
Dropping Julia are animated by warm and toasty basslines, soothing guitar, jazz-colored keyboard, lush waves of saxophone, punchy crisp drums, and topped off with Jules’ whimsical yet sultry vocals, passionately and poetically expressing her unique perspective on life. Their eclectic performances are vulnerable yet bold, full to the brim with infectious energy and quirky camaraderie, channeling a nostalgic past, and all wrapped up with Jersey sass and Virginia charm.
Check out Biggest Fan below and join the club at Dropping Julia’s website, Facebook and Instagram.
