New Audio: Rapidly Rising New York-based Pop Artist Julia Anrather Releases a Slow-burning, Quiet Storm-like Single

Julia Anrather is a New York-born and-based singer/songwriter and pop artist, who can trace the origins of her music career to when she began studying music as a small child. Anrather posted her first singles on Soundcloud back in 2015, where they caught the attention of Refinery29, who wrote “if we had things our way, she’d serenade us . . . every night . . . give us more, please.” By the following year, Anrather released her debut EP, 2016’s Quentin, which featured “Closer,” a track that premiered on Impose Magazine and was later included on their Week in Pop and Year in Pop compilations. The music video for “Closer,” which was made with long-time collaborator Luke Slattery premiered at Indiecurrent and went on to win Best Music Video at NYC Indie Film Fest and Coney Island Film Festival — and the video went on to screen at festivals across the States and European Union. Building upon a growing profile, Curtis Alto remixed Closer and was featured on the EDM act’s single “You Might” and its remix, which charted on Belgian radio while amassing over 500,000 Spotify streams.

The rapidly rising New York-based singer/songwriter and pop artist has spent the past two years writing and recording new material produced by Benjamin Julia and Ryan Dieringer and featuring collaborations with Grand Kid‘s Dan Kleederman, Alex D. Goldberg, L’Rain’s Taja Cheek, Vishal Nayak, Kyle Miles, Katie Jacoby, Puck‘s Kaley Puckett and JOVM mainstay Nick Hakim. Anrather’s latest single is the slow-burning and sultry “Dorothy.” Centered around a squiggly and shimmering synth arpeggio line played by Taja Cheek, a bluesy guitar line, a simple back beat, and Anrather’s soulful and tender vocals, the song evokes the swoon and ache of head-over-heels infatuation and crash and burn intimacy suddenly and inexplicably blowing up in your face. The song reveals a singer/songwriter, who can express an unvarnished vulnerability with a character that subtly subverts traditional gender roles and dynamics  — while drawing from Quiet Storm-like soul and Nick Hakim-like dusty atmospherics. “‘Dorothy’ is about being romantic in a  culture that recently invented the term ‘ghosting,'” Anrather explains in press notes.

“I was listening to a lot of Masseducation and Anti when we were working on this tune, so while both I and my co-producer Ryan Dieringer thought we were making an indie rock record, the sound I was looking for wound up being new territory for the both of us,” the New York-born and based singer/songwriter and pop artist says of the song’s creation.” We wound up making hundreds of drafts of the track, but because it didn’t come easy, ‘Dorothy’ represents a really full and specific collaboration between the two of us, which I’m grateful for. A moment that came very easily though was when Taja came by to record synths. I think we’d scheduled 4 hours with her, but she shows up, decides to play around with the DX7, it turned out the DX7 was broken but she forges ahead, builds a patch that we can’t recreate unless we break the DX7 again and then plays that wailing synth line that is now my favorite part of the song. I think we were done in an hour and then just ate dinner, it was ideal.

Dorothy Parker got involved when we heard a recording of her reading her poem ‘One Perfect Rose’ and decided that her voice with that eerie 1950s affect and that poem–about tired romantic tropes–made her the perfect hype woman for this song. (A sidebar is that I had to license the recording from the NAACP because she left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. and, when he was assassinated, it went to the NAACP. I didn’t think anything could make me like Dorothy Parker more but this info definitely did.)