In a music industry where credibility is often dependent on international exposure, fledgling singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin has quickly found herself with both. Jacklin has been bigged up by both Pitchfork and NPR, and received props from NME for a performance at the influential SXSW festival. Combine such acclamations with her kitschy videos (‘Pool Party’ shows her, deadpan, swaying to a waltz beat) and you’ve got both a healthy helping of hype and the inevitable question: should you believe it?

Recorded over three weeks in New Zealand with Marlon Williams collaborator Ben Edwards, Don’t Let The Kids Win is here to humbly assert that you should. The 11 songs possess a vintage sheen, confidently taking turns through folk and country, at times rock-influenced, elsewhere blues-tinged. They introduce Jacklin as a talented singer-songwriter with enough charm and skill, both vocal and lyrical, to draw in even the most skeptical listener.

Jacklin, 25, says seeing Britney Spears on TV at age 12 sparked her in interest in music and performing. That lead to singing lessons, and later, the formation of her first group, Salta, with friend and fellow Blue Mountains singer-songwriter Liz Hughes, who she credits with giving her the confidence to start writing.

Despite Jacklin’s relative youth, nostalgia is the pervading emotion throughout Don’t Let The Kids Win. It’s there in the waltzy rhythms that punctuate the record and in Jacklin’s classicist style of writing, which leans heavily on familiar folk and country melodies and chord sequences. On the title and final track, a sparse country ballad about growing up, Jacklin explains her reflective mood, crooning: “And I’ve got a feeling, that this won’t ever change, gonna keep on getting older, it’s gonna keep on feeling strange.”

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The steady Americana of lead track and single ‘Pool Party’ is perhaps the album’s most accessible moment. It retains a garage feel, with boxy drums laying down a tentative, school dance waltz as Jacklin’s laments a relationship scuppered by substances. Almost resigned to the fact, her voice soars as she asks: “My heart is heavy when you’re high, so for me why don’t you try?” The chiming guitar solo — following the vocal melody before cutting itself loose, perhaps mimics the path of the relationship itself.

With crunchy guitars, the decidedly more rockin’ ‘Coming of Age’ — the other track most illustrative of the album’s core theme — delivers a welcome shot in the arm. When it crashes into a Smiths-like groove, it captures a startling realisation that most twenty-somethings eventually experience. That your most idealistic, carefree years are gone. As Jacklin relays, “I didn’t see it coming, my coming of age.”

There are signs that this is a debut effort. Sometimes as Jacklin sings an American inflection pokes through that can’t help but take you out of the song. While it’s not enough to sully these tracks, it does suggest she’s still finding and honing her voice. Penultimate track ‘Haysplain’, meanwhile, is almost six minutes long and meanders along aimlessly for about three of them. The pay off is the beautiful harmonies towards the end, but the song — and therefore the record — would have benefited from brevity.

Still, if a mark of a good album is that’s it’s over before you know it, for the most part, Don’t Let The Kids Win hurtles by at a solid pace. Quickly, you’re back to the rush of the opening three tracks — one of the more impressive openings to a record you’ll hear this year. Beyond that, it establishes Jacklin as a lyricist worth listening to. On ‘Sweet Step’, her folky ode to dancing on her own, Robyn-style, Jacklin opens up about “shaking to get noticed” and how it “hasn’t worked for me yet”. If shaking didn’t do the trick, this album will.

7.5 / 10

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