Having stepped through the flames of heartbreak on her debut single ‘Desert Hills Motel’, Juli von Lou turns her gaze towards something equally profound and altogether tender on new single ‘Honky Tonk Angels’.
Beautifully anthemic, ‘Honky Tonk Angels’ is built around a steady drum, swelling strings, and Juli’s ethereal vocal. The track has a striking sense of space and scale, gradually opening out into an expansive, almost celestial soundscape. There’s a simplicity to the instrumentation that allows the melody to take centre stage.
Juli von Lou wrote ‘Honky Tonk Angels’ to cheer up a friend who was struggling. Juli explains, “Right before I wrote the song, we had met in my hometown for the first time after being friends over the internet for a long time. She was not doing well during that time. Neither was I.”
Juli has always felt the strange pull between extraordinary luck and suffering. She has cheated death several times, watched seemingly impossible opportunities fall into her lap, and often wondered what to make of it all. “Almost as if the universe itself needs to balance out luck and unluck to some kind of neutral median. If you’re gonna get extremely lucky you gotta pay it back in some way.” It was through this lens that Juli began to make sense of her friend’s own suffering, imagining her as something almost too otherworldly for this world.
“She is probably one of the most special people I have ever met. A true Honky Tonk Angel deserving of the world. But she’s also had to pay. And it’s not been cheap.” In Juli’s imagination, heaven is not so far away, but a place constantly tugging at its angels, calling them back home. “Of course heaven was tryna pull her back there, cause Honky Tonk Angels sure belong in heaven.” But beneath all the divine imagery is something intensely human: a plea to stay. A song written to remind one very special person that, despite everything, there is still someone on earth asking her not to leave.
Previous single ‘Desert Hills Motel’ turns heartbreak into something vast yet intimate, suspended between vintage melancholy and contemporary indie-pop. Juli describes it as “the story of a girl who promised me Nevada,” recalling how she imagined herself “roaming the strip waiting for her” before ultimately turning back home. Beneath its soaring strings and saloon-bar keys, the song is, as Juli puts it, “very theatrical and dramatic” but “very literal.”
Juli has always been a dreamer. Raised in an isolated industrial community in rural Sweden, “basically the Swedish version of the Midwest,”as she puts it, her childhood felt disconnected from the digital age of a 00s kid. Surrounded by forests, folk violin, bluegrass bands, farm animals, line dancing in barns, and her father’s vinyl collection, she grew up absorbing everything from David Bowie to 1960s classics.
For Juli, an ordinary life never felt like an option. “Where I’m from, it’s like the Midwest, but people don’t have that much hope. It’s America without the American dream,” she says. “At least in America, when it’s shit, everyone still believes they’re going to be the next one to make it. Where I’m from, people don’t really view it that way.”
That distance from modern noise shaped an artist fascinated by emotional extremes and imagined landscapes. Though she’s never set foot in the Midwest, it lingers throughout her music like folklore: the unsettling beauty of Mia Goth in A24’s Pearl, the rustic dreaminess of Little House on the Prairie, and the melancholy of Lana Del Rey, all set against deserted highways and vast blue skies.
There’s already a mythology surrounding Juli von Lou, an artist suspended between worlds: the Swedish countryside and imagined America, folk tradition and indie-pop cool, old-time romanticism, and a distinct sense of longing. Juli von Lou arrives with a sound that feels strangely familiar yet entirely her own.
Having already drawn a substantial crowd to her debut London headline performance at The Grace earlier this year, despite having no released music to her name, Juli von Lou now makes her proper introduction with ‘Desert Hills Motel’, a cinematic first chapter from an artist finally opening the doors to the world she has spent years building in her imagination.