Have You In My Wilderness is Julia Holter's most intimate album yet, a collection of radiant ballads. Her follow-up to 2013's widely celebrated Loud City Song explores love, trust, and power in human relationships. While love songs are familiar fodder in pop music, Holter manages to stay fascinatingly oblique and enigmatic on her new album.

Have You in My Wilderness is also Holter's most sonically intimate album. Here, she and producer Cole Marsden Greif-Neill lift her voice out of the layers of smeared, hazy effects, putting her vocals front and center in the mix. The result is striking--it sounds as if Holter is singing right in your ear. It sounds clear and vivid, but also disarmingly personal. The focused warm sound and instrumentation -- dense strings, subtle synth pads -- adds to the effect.

Like Holter's previous albums, Have You in My Wilderness is multi-layered and texturally rich, featuring an array of electronic and acoustic instruments played by an ensemble of gifted Los Angeles musicians.

Have You In My Wilderness deals with dark themes, but it also features some of the most sublime and transcendent music Holter has ever written. The ten songs on the album are shimmering and dreamlike, wandering the liminal space between the conscious and the subconscious.

"... What ultimately makes Have You in My Wilderness transcendent -- and unique in [Julia] Holter's catalogue -- is its intimacy. The atmosphere is often light-hearted or even parodic: In the giddy '70s singer/songwriter melismas of "Sea Calls Me Home," the husky, Marlene Dietrich-like delivery of "How Long?" or the jokey, clap-trap country shuffle of "Everytime Boots," you hear Holter trying on sounds like costumes, sometimes for only a bar or two. Ironically, the more she shapeshifts, the more we seem to get to know her. For an artist who could sometimes seem forbidding or remote, Have You In My Wilderness feels humane, and with each new release, it seems like a bit more of the personal is teased out of Holter's stately, high-concept approach. Have You In My Wilderness embraces the specific, rather than the eternal, and in her narrowed focus you can sense a palpable self-confidence and a hard-won precision." - Pitchfork Best New Music