Interview Julia Cumming: In Full Bloom
Presented with unfettered creative freedom for the first time since her career began, Julia Cumming set about discovering just who she was - as an artist, and as a person - beyond Sunflower Bean. Her self-titled debut solo outing, ‘Julia’, is the freewheeling result.
“I sing these words for me to hear the sound / To let them ring, to drown you out”: thus opens Julia Cumming’s debut solo album, ‘Julia’. These were also the first words the Sunflower Bean frontwoman wrote for it - words that would, in fact, go on to change the way she approached music entirely. “I wasn’t looking to make a solo record,” she reflects today, speaking to DIY a month before its release. “I’ve always loved bands. My first memories are of wanting to be in a band.”
In many ways, then, ‘Julia’ was never part of the plan. Having spent the better part of two decades in bands (with a parallel career as a model) music industry figures were often quick to suggest she should go solo – not, she suspected, because of any particular faith in her songwriting, but because her looks would make her “easier to sell”. “I think it’s very presumptuous to go to someone, especially a young woman, and say that you know what they should be doing,” she explains with conviction. “That experience inherently is wrapped up in some kinds of thinking that I feel are pretty antiquated.”
As a result, she actively rejected the idea of making a solo record for years. But while she toured the world and lived out her dreams with Sunflower Bean, the pressure to be “good enough” or “cool enough” had been building inside her like “a bunch of big rocks”, gradually raising the bar to increasingly unachievable heights. “I don’t think it’s unique, especially as a woman, to feel like you’re not performing enough, [or that] you’re not performing correctly,” she notes. “Especially in [music], where you’re looking for validation, you need to be accepted on some level to survive. Putting your worth in others all the time leaves you in a position where you will never feel like enough.”
Something needed to give, and eventually, it did: in 2020, lockdown happened, and all of a sudden, the scaffolding Julia had built her life around simply disappeared. She could no longer use audiences’ clapping to fill a “big insecure hole” inside her, and the two-year cycle of writing, recording, and touring a record melted away into months of writing sessions in the studio. The “immovable and untouchable” things that had dictated her life for two decades were no longer there, and sitting with that absence became the unlikely starting point for ‘Julia’, as she found herself asking a question she’d never really allowed to surface before: “What happens if you take everything away; if you take wanting to be loved away?”
“I could only make this when I was just willing to say ‘fuck it’ to everything. Nobody has to listen to it, nobody has to care. It’s not for them.”
Approaching creativity as play rather than craft, she let herself be washed by her influences – Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Brian Wilson – tinkering with familiar chords until something unfamiliar emerged. ‘Please Let Me Remember This’, for instance, was born from the tiny details she noticed in ‘Busy Doing Nothing’ by The Beach Boys. “It was the first time in my life that I was allowing myself to be a musician for no other reason than I thought it would be fun, and that I thought it would sound nice.”
Letting go of the expectations turned out to be exactly what Julia needed, and writing songs for herself became a version of self-love. But it also became an act of rebellion - a way of turning down the pressure in the bubbling cauldron that had been building for years. Finding a voice that was uniquely hers became her “guiding light”, while the album gave her a reason to push forward, all while pressing up against the boundaries of her comfort zone. “‘Okay, I need to make this thing, and this is the most important thing’,” she offers, recalling her creative mindset. “‘That puts me in situations which I need to rise to, but not necessarily be afraid of, because I know that what it is, is right. So I just need to keep showing up and moving it forward’.”
What followed ended up being more liberating than she could have ever imagined. Writing for herself gave her permission to lean into the parts of her personality that felt most real; by no coincidence, these were also the parts she felt no one would like, either because they were either too dorky or not “cool” enough. Julia compares it to being in middle school again, or the process of going through a “second artistic puberty” at 30: “You’re really hoping that you’re gonna bloom in some direction, but you don’t really have any proof yet.” Letting go of these hangups was the only way in. “I could only make this when I was willing to give it [my] all, when I was just willing to say ‘fuck it’ to everything,” she insists. “Nobody has to listen to it, nobody has to care. It’s not for them.”
Emotionally, it hasn’t been a steady ride: there was panic when she realised she was on her own in the studio, with no bandmates to defer to; fear was ever-present when recording. But listening to ‘Julia’ now, the main word that comes to mind is jazzed - a sure sign that a project which started out as a reaction to unattainable expectations has shrugged off its constraints in more ways than one. She smiles: “I’ve really had to make my own parameters for what success looks like, and I’m a really big believer in people being able to do that for themselves, and just being able to write their own story.”
And for the first time, Julia Cumming sounds like someone who already knows the answer doesn’t lie elsewhere. This isn’t the end of Sunflower Bean; rather, she compares her burgeoning solo career and her band to two trees planted next to each other - their roots talk to each other and share information and resources, creating a “beautiful little forest” where both are allowed to grow. “I really wanted to make a record where, if I got hit by a car tomorrow, I would know that I went all the way and really gave it my all, which I did. I gave it everything.”
‘Julia’ is out now via Partisan.
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As featured in the April 2026 issue of DIY, out now.
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