Julia Jacklin has released “The Hardest Thing,” the third single from her upcoming fourth studio album, The Gem, out September 25.
The Australian songwriter’s latest track follows “I Wish” and “Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon),” continuing a rollout centered on love, freedom and the tension between wanting intimacy without losing yourself inside it.
That tension sits at the core of The Gem.
“I want to love and be loved, but I also want to be free,” Jacklin says. “The tension between those two things has been the central question of my life.”
“The Hardest Thing” arrives with a one-shot music video directed by Danny Cohen and filmed entirely from a helicopter moving through the Melbourne skyline. The aerial approach gives the visual a scale that contrasts with Jacklin’s characteristically intimate songwriting, turning the city itself into part of the song’s emotional landscape.
The track also deepens the connection between The Gem and Melbourne, where Jacklin recorded the entire album.
Produced by Jacklin and Robert Muinos, The Gem was made at Rat Shack studios, located above The Gem, a small Collingwood pub Jacklin first discovered after moving from Sydney to Melbourne in 2017.
At the time, she barely knew anyone in the city. The pub became one of the places where she pushed herself into a new community and gradually began building a life there.
Eight years later, that same venue became the center of her fourth record.
Jacklin returned to The Gem with Muinos and musicians Jacob Diamond on guitar, Mimi Gilbert on bass and Jess Elwood on drums. Rather than recording in a pristine studio environment, the band worked in converted hotel accommodations above the pub, surrounded by the noise and movement of the building below.
That included foot traffic from nearby businesses, bands playing downstairs and the limitations that come with working inside a residential bar. They could not simply record at any hour, and sound bleed became part of the process rather than something to eliminate.
Jacklin and the band even played two unannounced shows at The Gem before recording the songs, using the live environment to test material before committing it to tape.
What was supposed to be a quick two-week recording process eventually stretched to nearly a year.
That prolonged search became part of the album’s identity.
Jacklin has described the title The Gem as a metaphor for excavation, an image of digging through uncertainty and trusting that something meaningful is buried underneath.
“The Gem felt like a metaphor for the whole process, because a lot of it did feel like digging,” she says. “I felt like I was doing it almost in the dark, just trusting I was going to find something.”
That makes “The Hardest Thing” especially fitting within the album’s larger framework.
Rather than presenting love as either liberation or confinement, Jacklin’s new material appears interested in the uneasy territory between the two. The record asks what it means to want closeness while also wanting autonomy, and how much of yourself you can give someone without losing the shape of your own life.
That emotional question has long been central to Jacklin’s songwriting, but The Gem places it inside a period of professional and personal transition.
When she began making the album, Jacklin was out of contract with her label and looking for new management. She also chose to record at home in Melbourne for the first time in her career after making three acclaimed records elsewhere: Don’t Let The Kids Win in 2016, Crushing in 2019 and PRE PLEASURE in 2022.
The shift appears to have pushed her toward a more communal way of working.
By the end of the sessions, Jacklin and her band commemorated the experience with matching circular tattoos representing opals, Jacklin’s favorite gemstone. In keeping with the record’s deeply local story, one of The Gem’s bartenders gave them the tattoos.
The album itself contains 10 tracks, including “Brand New,” “God Sometimes,” “If I Had The Hand Of God,” “Angel Vision,” “Real Life,” “You Turned On The Tap” and “Walk On Me.” “I Wish,” featuring The Maes, closes the record.
The Gem will be released digitally, on CD, cassette and vinyl. Multiple colored vinyl editions are planned, including Turquoise, Green Opal, Ruby and Rose Quartz variants.
Jacklin will support the record with an extensive North American, UK and European tour beginning in October 2026 and continuing into 2027.
The North American run begins October 20 at The Observatory North Park in San Diego before moving through Los Angeles and two nights at The Castro Theatre in San Francisco. The October 23 Castro show is already sold out, with a second San Francisco date scheduled for October 24.
From there, Jacklin will continue through Portland, Vancouver, Seattle, Denver, Austin, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Brooklyn, Boston and Philadelphia before returning to the UK and Europe.
If The Gem is an album about digging through uncertainty to find something valuable, “The Hardest Thing” feels like another piece of that excavation coming into view.
Featured image credit: Izzie Austin
