julie remember the night they realized things had changed. It was their first show back after the pandemic, at an art gallery on the outskirts of LA proper. Before lockdown, the trio — Alexandria Elizabeth on vocals and bass, Keyan Pourzand on vocals and guitar, Dillon Lee on drums — were used to playing for peers and friends. Now, they rolled up to their show and a line of people stretched around the block. Afterwards, the band was thronged with kids their age, looking to meet them, to talk about their music, take pictures.

Anyone in julie’s position would’ve been a bit shell-shocked, considering the band’s humble origins. The genesis of the group went back a few years, to the late ‘10s, when high school friends Lee and Pourzand decided to form a band after watching local acts around their hometown in Orange County. But as the two gravitated towards more shadowy and adventurous music, they felt out of place with the straight-up indie and punk around them. They reached out to Elizabeth, a musician they’d seen around and thought might be a kindred spirit. After Elizabeth’s addition as a second vocalist and bassist, julie’s lineup solidified. They had a simple goal back then: play one single show, and the project will be a success.

Still in their late teens, julie soon decamped to Los Angeles when Elizabeth and Pourzand enrolled in architecture school. As they continued to pursue the band in LA, their sense of possibility expanded. Fueled by the abundant inspiration around them in a newly adopted home more legible to the band, julie began working on songs destined for their debut album, my anti-aircraft friend.

That was back in 2019, and first julie would have to traverse a long, strange journey across the ensuing five years. Just before lockdown hit, the band completed recording a debut single called “flutter.” “We just wanted a thousand listens so it wasn’t embarrassing,” Pourzand remembers drily. Instead, the song soon racked up tens of millions of streams. A whirlwind developed around julie, that initial post-pandemic show in LA just the first taste of a sold-out American tour even when they’d barely released any music. Eventually, in the waning days of summer 2021, they released the EP pushing daisies, and followed it in 2022 with the double single “pg. 4 a picture of three hedges” and “through your window.” The fervor around them only continued to grow.

Yet even now, with the trio still in their early twenties, julie was well-suited to navigate the process. All three members are multi-disciplinary artists — in addition to their design background, Pourzand does sculpture work and Elizabeth writes and paints, while Lee is also a painter as well as illustrator. The band deliberates and conceives every element of their releases, not just the music therein but the art and packaging, all the way down to what instruments they play onstage.

Raw, hard-to-parse emotional territory has always been the thematic lifeblood of julie’s music. That’s truer than ever on my anti-aircraft friend. While the band stop short of fully unpacking the album’s evocative title, Lee alludes to “an unhealthy bond that is weighing you down, something you know it’s bad to have this deep connection to.” Much of the album has a similarly mesmeric character: the band inviting you to stare into dark corners with them, before trying to purge whatever’s waiting there. In the multi-part journey of “very little effort” or the volcanic choruses of “feminine adornments” alike, julie slither and surge through loud-soft dynamics, both representing the turmoil within and trying to burn it away.