Pre Pleasure

On her third album, Julia Jacklin trades the plainspoken heartbreak that made her name for something bigger and stranger — a record that puts strings and Catholic-girl guilt in the same room and lets them argue.

"Lydia Wears a Cross" opens the album with a child at Sunday service, more thrilled by the theater of faith than the belief behind it, and Jacklin never lets that early wonder curdle into easy cynicism. "I Was Neon" is where the writing bares its teeth — she circles the same anxious phrase about not wanting to lose herself until the repetition itself becomes the panic. What's changed is the scale: arrangements swell with strings and keys where earlier Jacklin would have left a guitar alone, and the ache of "Too in Love to Die" gets room to breathe rather than being confessed in a whisper. She sounds like someone who has decided that quiet honesty and grand gesture don't have to cancel each other out.