Julia Jacklin has spent the better part of a decade quietly becoming one of indie rock's most trusted narrators of interior life, and "If I Had The Hand Of God" — the last single pulled from her fourth album, The Gem (released Sept 25th) — finds her turning that same clear-eyed attention on the strange machinery of her own career.
Who is Julia Jacklin?
The Blue Mountains-raised, Melbourne-based songwriter first broke through with 2016's Don't Let the Kids Win, and has since become one of the most respected artists in contemporary independent music, with follow-up albums 'Crushing' (2019) and 'PRE PLEASURE' (2022)."
Her sound has always resisted easy categorisation, described variously as indie pop, indie folk, and alternative country, and she's kept a foot in scrappier territory too via her band Phantastic Ferniture. The Gem, out last Friday via 4AD, marks her fourth studio album and her label debut for the storied imprint.
The Song Itself
"If I Had The Hand Of God" arrives as the closing statement of the album's rollout, and it's a fittingly reflective one. Written following a surreal trip to Nashville, the song considers touring life and the question of what a musician might leave behind. Other outlets frame it similarly: the track is "a meditation on the life of a touring musician and the importance (or unimportance) of legacy." It's a theme that suits Jacklin, an artist whose best work has always come from turning a wry, slightly weary gaze on herself rather than performing certainty she doesn't feel. The video, shot by her regular collaborator Nick Mckk, leans into the song's sense of dislocation by relocating Jacklin to an unlikely backdrop.
The clip shows Jacklin wandering around Las Vegas, her perambulations encompassing the Sphere, the Caesar's Palace ceiling, the windswept desert hills around the city, and anonymous hotel hallways. It's a smart visual gambit — Vegas as the ultimate monument to spectacle and impermanence, a perfect stage for a song wrestling with legacy - and which captures the emotional register of the track rather well: not despair, not triumph, just the disorienting middle-distance of a life lived on the road. And of course there's a nice moment of her wandering down some anonymous steps wearing one of those three-foot-high feather tiaras beloved of Revue dancers.
The wrap-up
As a single, "If I Had The Hand Of God" doesn't try to be a big, hooky statement — it's more of an exhale, a moment of taking stock before the album proper lands (which it now has! - Ed.).
That restraint is both its charm and its slight limitation. Listeners hoping for another Crushing-style gut-punch may find this one more meditative than immediate. But Jacklin has earned the right to rest in this somewhat amorphic ambiguity, and there's something quietly moving about an artist this thoughtful, turning the lens on the absurdity of her own industry.
With The Gem produced by Jacklin herself alongside Robert Muiños, and a substantial international tour kicking off its North American leg on 20 October in San Diego, this feels less like a victory lap and more like an artist quietly recalibrating what success even means to her. It's a promising, if understated, note to end an album campaign on.
Featured photo by Richard Gray (Rugfoot) / CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.