Tell me about the new record Juliette, what’s changed?

I’m so excited about this new record, it’s a different sound for me. Some people know me from my previous band Juliette and The Licks and my band was breaking up (we’d been on the road for some time), and my main collaborator left to do another project and so there I was left rethinking the whole thing. I was craving a different sound, I wanted to get out of this straight up and down rock ‘n’ roll type song writing. I needed to go off into unexplored new territories and that’s why I called the record TERRA INCOGNITO.

What were you to achieve with this record?

I wanted to get deeper, I wanted to hear more groove, and the guitars are a bit more psychedelic, more atmospheric at time, and also I really explored melody. I started writing songs on piano and I hadn’t touched the piano since I was nine. So I wrote these first songs called ‘Always For God’, ‘Ghosts’, and ‘Female Persecution’ - they’re a little bit dark - but it was really intense for me because the piano unlocked emotion and lyric and melody. Then my next thing was finding a producer, somebody who could understand all these different facets in my musical self; is isn’t just this ra, ra, ra rock ‘n’ roll; there’s all these other areas I want to explore. The new record has more vulnerability than anything I have ever done.

There’s a blues song called ‘Hard Lovin’ Women’ that people are loving love when we’ve been performing it. But I found my dream producer in Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of Mars Volta - he composes all the music and plays guitar as well. I met him at the Fuji rock festival in Japan and naturally I was totally intimidated by him and my tour manager at the time said ‘Juliette why don’t you talk to him about the record?’ I said ‘right, he wouldn’t want anything to do with me, he wouldn’t understand me as a musician, and look down on me…’ But I reached out to him and he was excited about everything I was saying and he actually bonded over Fellini movies which was wild.

Is there a visual or cinematic aspect to your music then?

We were talking about the relationship between sound and vision, drama, and the record is really very cinematic. A lot of the songs take you on this visual journey and I’m so excited about it because it’s the first time I have tried to merge the two aspects - the heightened sense of fantasy and drama, and the sonic forces that I’m pretty excited about.