After spending the past couple of years cutting his teeth amongst Adelaide’s music circles as a member of Oopsie Daisy and Bart’s Nightmare, earlier this year Jackson Phillips stepped out on his own under the pseudonym Jackulson, sharing a collection of 80’s tinged post-punk that leaned into the frenetic roots of his previous projects with an added flare for the off-kilter. Now only a few months on from his debut release, he’s returned with ‘Tracy Hill’, another serving of warped art-pop that offers us another glimpse at where Jackson might be taking on us his latest project.

Opening with a swirl of warped guitar, frantic bass work and a haphazard groove, ‘Tracy Hill’ is instantly arresting. Fuelled by a thrilling sense of controlled chaos, the track unravels around Jackson’s hazy vocals, which come doused in reverb as they sit back amidst the tangles of instrumentation, sounding as enigmatic as they are enlivened. As the press release explains, the track finds Jackson tackling with “contemplations of the banality of life and the urge to disappear”, and fittingly, the track seems to embody these themes - in the final minute, the disorientating layers of sound turn corrosive and Jackson’s vocal presence is completely overrun, leaving the track to shift into a charged outro before ultimately closing in on itself.

To get the know the track a little better, we got in touch with Jackulson to uncover some of the key influences behind ‘Tracy Hill’.


Arthur Russell - ‘That’s Us/Wild Combination’

I would say this is definitely the main inspiration for 'Tracy Hill' and the reason I used so many effects on the mix. To me, Arthur Russel nails the *weird melody/simple song blend* because it doesn’t sound like he’s doing it on purpose, it just sounds like he’s too restless to write normal pop music. And I love that. The way the looping rock beat on this track frames the long, watery sounding instruments makes them come across so hypnotic and euphoric, almost in a 90’s Trace kind of way. This was something I totally tried to emulate on 'Tracy Hill'.


Suzanne Vega - ‘Book Of Dreams’

Big ups Suzy V. There are four or five songs of her’s that I could’ve chosen but I feel like this track relates most to 'Tracy Hill' with its melodic bassline, clean chiming guitars and sustained keys. I think listening to her greatest hits all the time is what led to me to try to sing different on 'Tracy Hill'. When I showed my friend the 'Tracy Hill' demo, they were like “you sound different here, you kinda sound like a choir boy.” Also I feel like I always rip off the bridge of this song where she’s just singing on semi crotchets with heaps of reverb. Love that part so much.


James Ferraro - Night Dolls With Hairspray

When I was first writing 'Tracy Hill' I was super into this album. It kinda sounds like 80’s glam pop coming through a boombox with a towel on top of it or something. It made it suddenly seem cool to just use simple beats and melodies for everything and also make everything sound super muffled and greasy (both figuratively and in a 1978 John Travolta kind of way). But when it came time to finish 'Tracy Hill', I scraped off most of the grease (sorry John) in favour of a shinier sound.

4 tha SuperFans: This is pretty much the one album that my old band Bart’s Nightmare rips off.

When I was adding synth strings to the bridge in 'Tracy Hill', it suddenly started to feel heaps like the Columbia Pictures intro logo in a weirdly emotional way. This intro was at the start of so many videos and DVDs I watched when I was really young so I have a lot of nostalgia attached to it. And when I was that age, I didn’t really understand that this logo thing was not in fact the first scene of the movie. So it felt a bit like this lady on these angelic steps was a character in the film who just never returned, which felt weirdly meaningful at the time. But yeah, it’s interesting how something so insignificant can leave such an impression on you when you’re like four.