‘Mondays’ starts with the romance of hand-picked roses and slow kisses, but there’s something less comfortable underneath it. Julia knows the relationship isn’t right for her, and as she imagines moving to New York, starting over in London or becoming someone else entirely, she finds herself stuck in the same place, dreading Mondays and wondering where her twenties have gone.

The song is about that feeling of wanting to change your life, imagining all the different versions of yourself you could become, but knowing that moving somewhere new doesn’t necessarily mean leaving yourself behind.

On the track, Julia says: “I think there’s a very specific feeling while moving through your twenties of constantly imagining the person you could become if you just moved somewhere else, changed your hair, changed your name, started over. While also knowing you’re still the same person wherever you go. ‘Mondays’ is about feeling out of control watching time pass, and being terrified that you’re wasting it. It’s also a nod to my previous song ‘Time Flies and I’m Miserable’. That song was 3 years ago now, and I’m still feeling the same.”

That reference to ‘Time Flies and I’m Miserable’ feels particularly fitting. Three years later, Julia is still asking herself the same questions, with ‘mondays’ looking back on the time that’s passed and the feeling that nothing has really changed.

Following September’s ‘Aurora’, ‘Mondays’ continues the shift in sound for Julia, moving beyond the folk-pop foundations of her debut EP Dreamland into something more atmospheric, while keeping the honest, personal songwriting that has always been at the centre of her music.

Released in April 2025, Dreamland was praised by New Zealand media as “one of our country’s strongest independent releases in years”. Julia has since continued to build her place in Aotearoa’s indie landscape, collaborating within Pōneke’s music community and co-writing and featuring on fellow Wellington artist Danica Bryant’s 2025 single ‘Narcissist’.