

The thing about Julia Holter’s featherlight art pop is its approachability: For all its unusual sounds and ideas, Materia is an album you could easily play on a Saturday drive to the grocery store or a quiet night in with friends. Holter has been working these angles for more than a decade, mixing globules of jazzy, Joni Mitchell-esque pop (“The Laugh Is in the Eyes”) with girl-group daydreams (“My Lost One”) and abstract tableaus of sound somewhere between modern classical, film soundtrack, and private-press bedroom experiments (“Clepsydra”). The through line is Holter’s easy but unflinching intimacy: No matter how far she gets off the ground, it feels like she’s singing directly in your ear.