On her self-titled solo debut, Julia Cumming steps out from the collective and into her own voice – reflecting on identity, misfit energy, and the New York upbringing that shaped her.

If home is where the heart is, then New York City native Julia Cumming has finally synced to its beat. Just a few years ago, inside the apartment she grew up in, she found herself at the piano, confronted with the lyrics that would awaken her self-titled debut solo album. ‘I sing these words for me,’ she declares on the opening track, “My Life”: a swan song for liberation, an act of self-actualisation, and a tune that lingers long after it’s taken up residence in your head. She had finally found the rhythm she’d been longing for – “but wasn’t particularly looking for,” the singer-songwriter tells me over Zoom, dialled in from the Chelsea Hotel’s outdoor terrace, a daring choice for a brisk January afternoon. In that moment, Julia realised what she’d been searching for had been there all along.

After that breakthrough – which she likens to “the Matrix” (“it was like I busted through a wall that I didn’t know I had put up,” she elaborates) – life did what it does best and kept moving. It wasn’t until Sunflower Bean, the band she forms one third of alongside guitarist Nick Kivlen and drummer Olive Faber, wrapped their 2022 album Headful of Sugar that Julia could no longer ignore the calling she’d stirred within herself.

“This voice,” she says, “was a combination of all these parts of me that had never spoken to me in that way.” Going solo, at that point, felt inevitable – perhaps even necessary. And while band drift might unnerve some, Nick and Olive met the shift with encouragement instead. “For them to see me bring this work to life, and to know how personally fulfilling it is – it’s all been part of a joyous musical world we share.” With a mission and a support system firmly in place, it was time to start assembling her team.“

Everything was very serendipitous,” she recalls of making Julia. Brian Robert Jones– the musician and producer whose CV includes Paramore, Gwen Stefani, and MUNA, and who would become her creative home base – entered the picture as an unlikely gift, met at a friend’s birthday party. “It was a very rewarding relationship for both of us.”

Intimidated at first, Julia’s solo live sessions quickly became sacred ground for candid confession. ‘A prisoner in my own mind,’ she clamours on the anxiety-ridden, honky guitar–laced “Ruled By Fear”, articulating a struggle familiar to countless young women. “This feeling of never being enough, of having to perform for everyone,” she explains, can land as a direct hit to one’s sense of identity. And yet, just a few tracks later, “Do It All Again” arrives as a moment of hard-won acquiescence –unapologetic, unflinching.

True to rock-star form, Julia was adamant that the album be recorded without judgment: nothing off the table, nothing overthought. A renewed surge of confidence – one she partly credits to Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who contributed to the record – helped her let go of inhibition altogether. That freedom courses through “I Dream of a Fire That Stays Burning When Nobody Tends It”, a feature track whose deliberately unwieldy title feels like bait for any hawk-eyed executive itching to slash it down to something more marketable. Julia doesn’t budge. “I don’t care if this chord change sounds like it’s from 19-fucking-70,” she shrugs. “I like it, and that’s what’s important. I never fit in anywhere anyway, so who gives a fuck?”

Julia partly blames her birth year for that sense of misalignment. A self-described Zillennial, born in 1996, she says she “spent the first decade of [her] career trying to get Millennials to like [her],” often treated less as a peer than a kid sister within the DIY scene. Then, “the pandemic happens, Gen Z takes over” – another generation she tries, unsuccessfully, to slot into. She still has “the Millennial pause when [she makes] a TikTok,” she adds, half-joking.

Despite that persistent feeling of being out of step, Julia has always gravitated towards people who kept her musical faith intact. Before Sunflower Bean, there was Supercute!, a psychedelic pop project fronted by a 13-year-old Julia alongside Rachel Trachtenburg. Before that, there was an even smaller Julia, dancing on her father’s feet to Elliott Smith. “We share a real musical connection,” she says, smiling. Along with his surname, Julia inherited her father’s musical instincts – the bassist guiding her hands long before she thought of music as a future.

But it wasn’t just genetics. Growing up in NewYork City proved catalytic. Venues now shuttered but once central to the city’s art-rock ecosystem – SideWalk Café, the Bowery Poetry Club – were regular stops on family outings. Witnessing living, working artists left a permanent imprint. “The goal was survival,” she recalls. “To keep your rent-stabilised apartment, to protest, and to just do your thing. Seeing that made it possible for me to get through a lot of challenging eras.

”Commercial success, she insists, was never the aim– neither for her nor for the artists she idolised. Still, rent has a way of demanding compromise. Modelling became, as she puts it, “a means of survival,” inspired by a friend who turned to fashion to sidestep the grind of a nine-to-five.

At just 18, Julia became a favourite of former Saint Laurent creative director Hedi Slimane. She travelled extensively, styled by Hedi, made up by PatMcGrath, photographed by Steven Meisel. These days, the runway has given way to front-row seats at Ann Demeulemeester under Stefano Gallici, and McQueen under Seán McGirr. “I hope that as I move into this next part of my career, I can take what fashion has given me and make the fantasy deeper,” she says. “Use that beauty to reinforce what I’m doing with music.”

Nearly two decades into performing, Julia has already transformed in ways she barely recognises. What remains intact is the New York artist’s backbone – ardent, principled, unyielding. From an early age, she was taught to stand for something. “If you weren’t going to a protest once a week, you weren’t doing enough,” she says, recalling the ethos she grew up around.

In the same casual tone, she recounts conducting [the youngest woman ever elected to Congress] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first-ever interview, and later opening for[U.S. senator] Bernie Sanders during stretches of his campaign tour. She looks straight into the camera – about as direct as Zoom allows – and assures me she’s “very passionate.” Which explains why Zohran Mamdani, now New York’s mayor, joined Sunflower Bean onstage during a hometown show. “A friend of mine was organising the campaign,” she says. “As soon as the idea came up, I was like, oh my God – this would be incredible.”The band didn’t know if Mamdani would make it until the final moment. “We finished, I looked to the right – and there he is,” she declares. “I love that we got to be a footnote in what I hope will be an amazing mayoral experience.”

No matter how Julia approaches music – how, when, or why – one thing remains fixed: “to have the outlet is the gift.” And now, she’s intent on using it.

Photography by Brendan Wixted
Styling by Dylan Wayne
Words by Juliette Eleuterio
Hair by Chelsey Pickthorn
Make-up by David Razzano at Art Department
Producer Dakota Griffin of 199X New York
Production Supervisor Sneha Mendes