Julia Jacklin’s third album, Pre Pleasure, came out in 2022 and demonstrated that she had figured out how to make the recording process serve the songs rather than the other way around. The Australian singer and guitarist has always written with a directness that her earlier production sometimes softened. Pre Pleasure let the directness land.

Jacklin’s 2019 album Crushing established her as a songwriter of unusual precision. Songs like Pressure to Party and Head Alone dealt with bodily autonomy and the expectations placed on women with a specificity that made them feel like journalism as much as songwriting. Pre Pleasure is quieter and more interior, but no less precise.

The record opens with the title track, which is about anticipatory anxiety, the gap between imagining an experience and having it. From there it moves through questions about identity, creativity, and the specific kind of self-examination that comes with turning thirty in public. The production, handled by Jacklin with Marcus Paquin, strips most of the previous album’s rock gestures and finds something more austere underneath.

Pre Pleasure is an album that rewards the kind of attention that most contemporary music competes against rather than for. It is patient and specific and trusts its listener to stay with it. Those qualities are rarer than they should be.