Julia Gartha - California's Killing Me EP
There’s a particular kind of restlessness that comes with chasing a dream somewhere far from home. The place you once imagined as the answer to everything can slowly become a source of frustration, leaving you caught between the life you’ve built and the one you can’t stop missing. On California’s Killing Me, her six-track self-released EP, Julia Gartha turns that tension into an intimate, emotionally candid collection about homesickness, growing pains, and the uncertainty of figuring out what comes next.
The Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, and producer has spent years building an impressive resume behind the scenes and alongside some of pop’s biggest names, contributing to projects connected to Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Daniel Caesar, and Harry Styles. Currently touring as a backing vocalist on Styles’ Together, Together tour, Gartha knows what it takes to help bring someone else’s vision to life. Here, however, the spotlight belongs entirely to her, as she channels her experience into songwriting that feels personal without losing its universal appeal.
Blending pop, indie, folk, and contemporary singer-songwriter sensibilities, California’s Killing Me finds Gartha working alongside producer and co-writer Caleb Dee to create a sound that complements the conversational nature of her lyrics. Rather than overcomplicating its emotions, the EP allows its stories to breathe, balancing modern production with the kind of unguarded reflection that feels like listening to a friend finally admit what’s been weighing on them.
The EP's opening track “Mall of America” immediately establishes a connection to the familiar, setting the stage for a collection shaped by the complicated relationship between where you come from and where you end up. That push and pull becomes the EP’s emotional foundation, with Gartha exploring the strange experience of building a life that looks like progress from the outside while feeling increasingly uncertain on the inside. The result is a project that understands how ambition and dissatisfaction can coexist, especially when the dream you’ve pursued begins to look different from the one you originally imagined.
On “Not In The Room,” Gartha shifts her attention to the uncertainty of a long-distance relationship, questioning whether someone who offers the bare minimum even notices her absence. It’s a familiar predicament, but the song’s emotional weight lies in the questions it leaves hanging: how much of a relationship exists in the distance between two people, and how long can you keep investing in someone who may not be meeting you halfway? Gartha approaches the subject with the same directness that defines the EP as a whole, allowing the vulnerability of the situation to speak for itself.
The title track brings the project’s central conflict into sharper focus. California is more than a geographical setting; it represents the complicated reality of chasing something you once wanted badly enough to leave everything else behind. As Gartha reckons with her attachment to Los Angeles and her growing desire for something different, the song captures the uncomfortable realization that loving a place doesn’t necessarily mean it’s where you belong. It’s an especially resonant idea for anyone who has ever mistaken persistence for happiness or struggled to admit that a long-held dream might need reconsidering.
Elsewhere, “Sun and the Moon” and “Pencil Marks” contribute to the EP’s broader atmosphere of reflection, reinforcing its interest in the ways memory, distance, and changing circumstances shape our understanding of ourselves and the people around us. These songs sit within a tracklist that feels less concerned with delivering definitive answers than with documenting the process of searching for them. There’s an honesty in that approach: life rarely offers a clean resolution just because we’ve reached the end of a difficult chapter.
The closing track “Itching For Change” brings the EP’s restlessness into direct conversation with the future. Turning inward, Gartha confronts her desire to move forward in both her personal life and career, even when the next step remains unclear. It’s an appropriate conclusion for a record built around the tension between staying put and starting over. Change can be frightening, particularly when you’ve invested so much in getting where you are, but the song recognizes that remaining in place has its own costs. Sometimes, the hardest part of moving forward is accepting that you don’t need to know exactly where you’re going and acknowledging that something has to give.
What makes California’s Killing Me compelling is its willingness to sit with uncertainty rather than package it into an easy lesson about following your heart. Gartha understands that nostalgia can make the past seem more appealing than it was, just as ambition can make an unsatisfying present feel like something you’re obligated to endure. Across these six tracks, she explores the space between those competing instincts with a sincerity that gives the EP its cohesion.
Having spent much of her career lending her voice and songwriting talents to other artists, Gartha makes a convincing case for the value of bringing that experience back to her own material. California’s Killing Me is an understated but affecting snapshot of someone reassessing the life she’s built, learning to recognize her own needs, and confronting the possibility that the future she wants may require leaving parts of her current life behind. It doesn’t pretend that finding your way is easy, nor does it suggest that every period of stagnation comes with an obvious exit. Instead, Gartha finds meaning in the messy middle, where longing, frustration, and hope all exist at once.
Ultimately, California’s Killing Me is a reminder that pursuing a dream and questioning it aren’t mutually exclusive. Sometimes, figuring out where you belong begins with admitting that you’re no longer sure. For Gartha, that uncertainty becomes the foundation for a thoughtful, relatable collection that finds beauty in the uncomfortable process of learning what comes next.
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