Everything She Keeps Inside

The matryoshka is a good metaphor for songwriting—you open one layer and find another, smaller version of the same thing inside, and then another, and at some point you stop being sure which one is the real one. Julia Marcell, the Polish singer-songwriter, seems to understand this instinctively. Her music tends to sit in that particular tension between intimacy and distance: the lyrics come close, the arrangements stay back just enough to keep you reaching. Matrioszka leans into that structure directly, using the doll as a way of talking about the layers people construct around themselves and whether anyone ever actually gets through them. Careful, considered, and patient in a way that most music about vulnerability isn’t.