Despite its sonic shift towards the positive, however, ‘PRE PLEASURE’ lyrically continues to grapple with an array of difficult subjects. “When I look into the mirror / I see my father when I close my eyes,” she sings on ‘Less Of A Stranger’, instead exposing the fault lines in her relationship with the mother who birthed her. Such red-raw lyrics support a perception of her as an open, vulnerable songwriter, even if not all of her songs are autobiographical. Does she feel a pressure to maintain that impression?

“I don’t, but I think that people think that I do and that makes me worried,” she says, laughing again. “I worry that, because I’m pigeonholed in that place, people think that I write this kind of music because I want to stay relevant – because it feels fashionable.”

She continues: “I honestly don’t really know what vulnerability is because I feel like, to be truly vulnerable, I wouldn’t put it on a record. There are definitely things that I keep to myself. This is the stuff I’ve actively decided I’m OK with putting out. Sometimes with the vulnerability thing it feels like it’s implied that I’m not in control of my own work, like I accidentally put this stuff on the album.

“I feel like other people determine whether or not they think I’m being vulnerable. I’m not sure if I could ever say that myself. Maybe I’m dead inside or something ‘cause I don’t necessarily feel that vulnerable?” She takes a breath and reconsiders. “No, I mean, I do, but it really depends on the day. Some days I don’t give a shit and then other days I’m like, ‘Oh, why did I put that on there?’”

Julia has a wry sense of humour and a tendency to lean into self-deprecation. “The stuff I write about is not revolutionary,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like I’m being praised for being vulnerable and then if I don’t interrogate it I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m being so vulnerable!’. But I’m secretly like, ‘Am I?’ - I don’t know? I just wrote some songs.” As for the gossipy guesswork about whether the tales in her tracks are true, she says “it doesn’t really matter”. “I’m not writing a memoir,” she notes.

Despite Julia wanting her songs to be freely interpreted by listeners, she isn’t totally averse to offering her own explanations. Towards the end of today’s chat it’s put to her that the loungey ‘Ignore Tenderness’ resurfaces the bodily and sexual autonomy trope in ‘Crushing’. Lines such as “I’ve been stripping right down / Staring at my own reflection” recall ‘Head Alone’. “Ignore the tenderness you crave / Be naughty but don’t misbehave,” meanwhile, echoes the conflicting language around sex advice. It also speaks to the wider conversation about how women’s pleasure isn’t prioritised.

“It’s kind of about all those things really,” she says, “but it’s mainly about trying to be an adult who feels like I can prioritise my own sexual pleasure and can feel like I’m worth that when my early sexual experiences were not like that. My early sex education was terrible. [The song] is acknowledging how much early sexual experiences can damage your relationship to your own body and your own sexuality.”

It’s interesting that Julia appears to find it hard to indulge too much in the meaning of her songs, since she mentions being a “student of great lyricists who use humour and trickery”. Fiona Apple, Leonard Cohen and Gillian Welch were her heroes growing up. “I’m a huge songwriting fan, first,” she says, “and their songs can take you on these journeys where you don’t fully know where they’re going to go with such interesting use of language.”

That’s about as neatly as you can sum up Julia Jacklin’s music – be it on ‘PRE PLEASURE’ or her records past. There are as many loose as tight ideas, as many resolved as unresolved issues, as much solemnity as dark humour, and an often pleasing lightness dappling the shadows of her music. But sometimes, of course, it’s just not that deep.

‘PRE PLEASURE’ is out now via Transgressive.