Julia Cumming isn’t Debbie Harry, she’s Burt Bacharach

Blondie. The Ramones. Talking Heads. The Strokes. Geese. Trawl back through the history of New York bands and you’ll find a potted list of some of the coolest motherf***ers ever to grace a stage. It’s the city that birthed the CBGB club and an entire substrata of 1970s punk; the city that gave us Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement. And so, when indie-rock trio Sunflower Bean burst on to the scene in the mid-2010s in a flurry of fuzzy riffs, bleached blonde hair and precocious youth (the group’s press-igniting debut EP Show Me Your Seven Secrets was released before its members turned 20), there seemed a natural lineage for the group and their frontwoman Julia Cumming to slide into. Cumming had also recently signed a modelling contract with Yves Saint Laurent; frequently referred to as “Hedi Slimane’s muse”, to the world she seemed like Debbie Harry 2.0. But internally, Cumming was trying to reconcile a new identity that felt like an ill fit.

“Even though it’s an area where we all get to operate outside of the norm, we as musicians and the people working in [music] create so many other boxes that you have to fit into. There’s so much leather jacket pageantry,” she considers, skewering the entire scene in three disdainful words. “We internalise the ideas of ourselves that other people have and we become them over time because that’s easier than figuring out who we really want to become. And I think musicians can be [particularly] prone to this because all we’re looking for is to be liked. For some reason, we’re weirdos who need that applause to feel like we exist or feel like we’re valid…”

Cumming was born into this Manhattan music scene, the daughter of Alec Cumming and Cynthia Harden — both members of 1990s indie band Bite The Wax Godhead. Now 30, she is speaking the day before her first US solo tour kicks off — during which she will soak up the applause for a very different kind of project. Julia, her eponymously titled debut solo record, prioritises luscious singer-songwriter excavations of the heart, influenced by Brian Wilson, Carly Simon, Burt Bacharach and many of history’s other boldly emotive auteurs. It’s the type of music that, for years, she feared would make her seem “boring”. “I thought, you know, what am I going to do? Be just another… f***ing lady trying to put her songs out?” she says. But things started to change during the pandemic, when Cumming watched her old routine quickly crumble. Soon, she began to question whether the relationship she’d had with the music industry since forming her first band Supercute! at 13 actually had to be that way.

“Even within indie rock, there were structures that I thought were immovable because of what you’re always told. You have six months to write a record, then you have 18 months to tour the record, then you have another six months to write the next record. But then the pandemic happens and you’re like, ‘Oh, nothing matters actually!’” she laughs. “The whole thing can f***ing dissolve in a couple of weeks and then we’re all selling livestream videos! So when the world around you starts to dissolve, your own ideas of how you’re supposed to interact with it dissolve. That was the beginning of thinking that life could be different.”

For Cumming, the process of unpicking the last decade or more of her life was a complicated one. Sunflower Bean had received significant acclaim — four critically praised albums and a place within the modern indie canon. The trio are still together and Cumming speaks of her bandmates with affection. But growing up in an industry that puts its highest price tag on youth and beauty had taken its toll on her core sense of self. “I was very grateful for [the opportunities] because modelling allowed the music that we were making to get into some places that it wouldn’t have before, but when you become accepted through someone else’s idea of what you are, you’re never gonna feel what you would hope to,” she says.

Even something as seemingly simple as a dye job became entrenched in the delicate line between success and failure. “When I went blonde is when things took off [for the band], so then it became reinforced as, ‘OK I have to be blonde for the rest of my life in order to have a job’,” she says, her hair now returned to its natural rich brown. “And it’s an extremely expensive process, so every month you have to figure out how you’re even going to afford to sit for eight hours with bleach on your head just to become a version of yourself that you think someone will like.”

Early in her career, before she had even formed Sunflower Bean, Cumming remembers playing some early solo demos to a “trusted friend”. More than 10 years later, their reaction is documented in the lyrics to Julia’s lead single My Life: a heady, buoyant track about reclaiming your own narrative, accompanied by a breezy video directed by her partner, Edgar Wright. It’s a fitting opening to her solo career, as it documents the moment that meant it almost never happened.

“That friend said that [my music] was weird, that it was too confessional and I took that as truth. I wanted to be in a band so much and because I got some of this feedback at a pivotal moment I felt like, ‘Well, if I get myself in a band, all these horrible parts about myself will be tempered. They’ll be fixed by other people around me who are better. And when I’m fixed, I’ll be accepted and I’ll be OK’,” she says. “I really internalised this thought that, left to my own devices, I was not capable of being good at music, at being myself, at anything.”

Listening to Julia now, it’s ironic that the deeply felt, confessional nature of these songs is their greatest quality. Cumming digs into scenes from an adolescence on the margins to an adulthood spent wrangling with insecurity. Across the record, there is a sense of curiosity but also defiance and of writing something completely true.

Album closer Forget the Rest is “maybe the most disgusting song I’ve ever written — it’s dirty underwear and UTIs and gross behaviour,” but My Life is probably the most clear-headed: “I sing these words for me / I sing them loud / ‘Cause I’m still free / ‘Cause I’m allowed.” Cumming is in a good place. “I like growing up. I really like getting older. It’s nice to get smarter. It’s nice to get stronger. It’s nice to be less afraid, especially when you didn’t know you were so afraid,” she says.

Her musical education in the DIY-spirited indie-rock trenches has given her the sort of “put up or shut up” mentality that’s necessary as an artist in 2026. It’s hard out there but, in her own words, “figure it out or don’t. Make something happen or don’t. You just have to figure it out to the best of your ability. [Although] it says a lot about privilege and financial privilege in this field, because you see the people that can weather it and wonder where that funding is coming from.

“But I think you also just have to be very creative, and do your best. Something like 100,000 songs get uploaded to DSPs [like Spotify] every day, and probably 70 per cent of them are now AI. The only good that comes from that is that it pushes people who are actually making the work to ask themselves deeper questions about what they want to do and what they want to say.”

With her solo debut, however, there’s no doubt that Cumming knows exactly what she wants to do and how she wants to say it. It’s a hard-earned middle finger up to the ideas that are no longer serving her and a gorgeous step into a brave new dawn. “If I got hit by a car tomorrow, I would know at least I tried everything [with this record],” she says. “I sat there for days and went into the depths of my heart to find some great stuff and some really ugly, scary stuff. And I think in a lot of ways, with all the time it’s taken… that’s just how it had to go.”

This lush opening album track is a glorious ode to self-realisation.

A Carly Simon-esque kiss-off to a stumbled-across former lover.

Her band in peak Brooklyn indie-pop form.