June Jones: quick links
In If Only, an earlier song of Melbourne-based musician June Jones, she invites the listener to meet her in a video game – ‘I designed my character to be mostly true … / But no matter how hard I try, I can never really be her’.
Tracing her music from emo punk in first band Two Steps on the Water to electro to pop in her solo offerings – Diana, Leafcutter and Pop Music for Normal Women – it’s clear that Jones is alight with the art of transformation and exploring new sonic spaces to see where she fits in.
A trans musician who has spoken about her ADHD diagnosis, Jones’ music is intensely personal, the lyrics forensic, interrogating gender identity, mental health, disability, a childhood of trauma, how creativity works and what healing might look like.
In an interview with NME, she likens her mind to a shopping mall food court: ‘I’ve never seen my internal world so well described by external reality: very bright, very loud, lots going on, hard to focus on anything.’
June Jones: focus
When it comes to music, though, Jones seems able to focus. She is a one-stop powerhouse, writing, recording, producing, mixing and releasing her latest LP, Would That It Were a Fortress. Learning to record on her own during lockdown, these new songs shift again here to catchy and exuberant pop that swirls around a sense of calm and confidence, with notes to lovers and soft entreaties on how to move beyond what binds us.
In the single Bachelorette, a smooth mix of bass, guitar and club cool, she dreams of settling, hoping for a bridge of understanding, of an easy vibe, ‘never wasting a day in bed with you,’ while Be Honest is a stripped back and intimate conversation, soft details of lovers like a ‘butterfly keyring,’ searching for connection. Backed by Cure-like synths, Jones’ voice is seductive but has clarity; she wants to be heard.
June Jones: voice
Jones has spoken of the tensions she has experienced in the way her voice sounds as a trans woman singer: ‘I feel constantly conflicted about what people are reading into the sound of my voice,’ while also enjoying working in the deeper register (NME).
In her latest EP, this self-consciousness seems to have moved on. Her voice is polished and lustrous, unique, especially in the wave-like All I Got, which offers a lingering contrast between an instant catchy dance hit and strange imagery flights: ocelots, taking a sip from a bird’s beak, a lost kiss ‘masticating on my tongue’.
June Jones: sadness
There is sadness at the pop’s core, too. From the first piano chord strike to the rise of strings, we find so much buried in Whole World and its chorus line, ‘I’ve got the whole world in my heart’: the empathy of characterisation and what she has to offer, waiting for it to be acknowledged and seen.
The helicopter-whir of beats brings the listener aloft to think about fantasy and the devastation when it plummets. ‘Whether it’s with magic or a family / Both of them are equally as hard for me.’
June Jones: Eyes on Me
In my favourite track, Eyes on Me, the tone is at first playful, exploring games for lovers, searching for clues: ‘I’m looking for a lead pipe in the kitchen, in the study.’ The driving heartbeat pounds the listener along the train tracks to a place where ‘this is real life with me, not on the screen’. The façade is coming down and what’s left in its wake? The wheel-skids in the track bring Jones back from the edge.
This song’s use of lyrical repetition seems to encapsulate Jones’ career to date and what she’s setting out to do as an artist, a mantra of sorts: what happens when you get past rage, when you risk moving beyond trauma to a place of comfort and warmth?
Like the EP itself, the song is a chrysalis, wrapping her and the listener:
‘I wanna be different to what I have been, I wanna explore, I wanna know more, I wanna transform, try everything, I wanna be different to what I have been …’
If you want more of an August soundtrack, check out this audio feast of new albums from Australian artists:
Emily Lubitz, Two Black Horses, 18 July
Folk Bitch Trio, Now Would Be a Good Time, 25 July
Dojo Cuts, Never Have I Ever, 14 August
Mama Kin Spender, Promises, 15 August
Emma Louise and Flume, Dumb, 22 August
Would That It Were a Fortress is released on 29 August 2025.
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Kirsten Krauth is an author, poet and podcaster. Her bestselling novel ‘Almost a Mirror’ was shortlisted for the Penguin Literary Prize and SPN Book of the Year, and sparked a successful podcast about 80s pop and post-punk songs.
