Julia, Julia (The Coathangers) Announces new album Sugaring a Strawberry out September 9 on Suicide Squeeze/Happy Sundays Records
Watch the video for the first single “Bound” here
Sugaring a Strawberry is a study in coming undone—on purpose. Recorded at COMA, Julia Kugel’s home studio, and mixed through a custom Flickenger clone, the album drifts in and out of clarity like memory itself. It’s emotionally retrospective, creatively unvarnished, and deeply human. You can hear it in the hiss, the warmth, in the vocals so raw they’re like an open window. These songs weren’t engineered for perfection. They were built to breathe.
“Bound” opens the album like a secret passed between sisters, solemn and unspeakably close. It begins with the softest of touches: hushed guitar, a near-whispered delivery that carries the intimacy of someone singing only for one other person. It’s a love song, but not romantic, more ancestral in the way long bonds can be. The lyric “I will be your home” is like a vow that has already been kept again and again. Hovering between devotion and entrapment, it unfolds slowly and sacredly.
Julia explains, “I made Sugaring A Strawberry in an effort to reconnect to something human. AI, streaming, and the digital experience of music have left me feeling a bit empty. I wanted to re-evaluate and reset. I would love for people to experience the record on vinyl – with all the cracks and imperfections. Along with the legendary Suicide Squeeze Records, Sugaring A Strawberry is proudly co-released on Happy Sundays Records—an extension of the festival we put on every year. This will be the first record released on Happy Sundays Records.”
The “Bound” video was directed by Your Intimate Noise and edited by Scott Montoya. Julia says, “the video is a dreamy representation of the song – a retro style technicolor dream. Grateful to get the chance to work with Your Intimate Noise again after our collaboration on the “Do It Or Don’t” video for the last record. As always with the best editing by Scott Montoya.”
Watch the video below. Julia, Julia will also be performing at her annual festival, Happy Sundays in Long Beach, California next month.
Happy Sundays Free Music Festival
All glow and undercurrent, “I Know,” is like hearing someone hum through a wound. The track arrives as if it had been waiting, coiled and complete, to be sung. Its pulse is slow but insistent, anchored on a hypnotic loop and a vocal that’s half-incantation, half-confession. “But I’m a fighter now” rises like a mantra, fragile but certain, the kind of line that doesn’t demand belief so much as carry it.
One of the most outward-facing songs on the record, “Feeling Lucky,” opens like a cigarette flicked in the dark– smoky and a little bit slick. Built on a skeletal beat and a nearly detached vocal, it leans into a sarcastic swagger that barely masks the ache beneath. The delivery is droll and glazed, the instrumentation is sparse and a little woozy, leaving space for her voice to sway—a shrug of a song, stylish in its sadness.
“A Love That Hurts” drifts in on soft, fingerpicked guitar and a dry, close-mic vocal that feels both haunted and immediate. The mix is stripped down and analog-warm, letting tape hum and silence frame the emotion. Julia sings like she’s remembering something she doesn’t want to, each line a slight unraveling. Like the rest of the album, “A Love That Hurts” doesn’t push toward resolution. It sits in the ache, sifts through it, makes it beautiful.
Julia’s long-time collaborator and husband, Scott Montoya, mixes it all so loosely that you can hear the air between tracks— a space that makes the music feel inhabited rather than recorded. Sugaring a Strawberry doesn’t seek catharsis so much as stumbles into it. There’s a quiet volatility to these songs like they might fall apart if you press too hard. It moves in shadow and softness, asking questions it doesn’t answer. It doesn’t end with closure. It ends with truth.
Praise for Julia, Julia:
“…Kugel has found it again by returning to the fine-spun folk threads of her solo singles from a decade ago and adding layers of Julee Cruise-style eerie calm and reverb…”
– MOJO
“…the debut solo record from Julia Kugel as Julia, Julia is shaping up to be a meditative—if not downright peaceful—capsule of the songwriter’s more introspective side.”
– FLOOD
“While her previous work rested on the rambunctious and energetic side, she steers in the opposite direction with this new single, offering a more intimate and psychedelic experience. “Fever in My Heart” is like a drug that keeps drawing you deeper and deeper into its reign.”
– Consequence
Album Tracklist
2. A Love That Hurts
3. Breathe
4. Feeling Lucky
5. Flickering Light
6. I Know
7. Blackout
8. Stalemate
9. Hang On
10. One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong
