“I want to love and be loved, but I also want to feel free. The tension between those two things has been the central question of my life,” says Julia Jacklin. It’s also the theme that underpins her fourth album The Gem.

When Julia Jacklin first moved to Melbourne from Sydney in 2017, she discovered a little bar on a back street in Collingwood, where bands pushed dining tables to the side and set up in a corner on the floor. She didn’t really know anyone in town too well, but she knew she wanted to make the city her home, and so she started hanging out there, forcing herself out of her comfort zone. The pub was aptly named The Gem.

Fast forward eight years, and Jacklin, with three celebrated solo records under her belt – Don’t Let the Kids Win (2016), Crushing (2019) and PRE PLEASURE (2022)  Jacklin wanted to do things intentionally this time around. She wanted to back herself. And she wanted to make the record at home in Melbourne: something she’d never done before. So she called up her old drinking buddy Robert Muinos, owner of Rat Shack studios, which is located above her favourite old pub. For The Gem sessions she was also joined by longtime friends Jacob Diamond on guitar, Mimi Gilbert on bass, and Jess Elwood (Alex Lahey, Angie McMahon) on drums.

“The Gem felt like a metaphor for the whole process, because a lot of it did feel like digging. I felt like I was almost doing it in the dark, just trusting that I was going to find something,” says Jacklin of the record, which conjures images of excavation, of reinvention, of trusting your instincts and surrounding yourself with the people and things that make life worthwhile. It’s a soaring document of the songwriter’s journey back to herself.