Julia Kate Finds Peace in the In-Between on New Single “truce”
- Mar 13
- 3 min read
There is a version of this song that doesn't get written. The one where the artist decides the feeling is too small, too specific, too unglamorous to name out loud. Julia Kate decided otherwise.
"truce", the new single from the Sherman Oaks-born, Berklee-trained singer-songwriter, arrives the way most truly felt things do: quietly, without ceremony, with the particular ache of something that has been carried a long time before finally being set down.
At 21, Julia Kate is already fluent in the language of emotional precision. A double major in Songwriting and Music Business, she has spent her formative years learning to write the kind of song that does not let you look away. The lineage is there. But "truce" is something she arrived at herself.
"I think a lot of body shaming doesn't come from other people anymore, it comes from inside your own head. This song is me recognising that voice and asking it to quiet down, even just a little." Kate shares on the single.
Written alongside longtime collaborator Nick Rosen, the track began, as the best songs tend to, with words moving faster than thought. The melody came first. The arrangement followed. Built to hold the emotional core rather than dress it up. What resulted is a song that sounds like a breath being let out slowly: tender, unflinching, and soft in the way that only brave things can be.
At its heart, "truce" is about the internal war, the one that runs quietly beneath the surface of a day. The version that plays out not in arguments or altercations, but in a glance at your own reflection. Julia has been tall her whole life. She has been self-conscious for nearly as long. And even as the habits shifted-the eating, the exercise, the doing everything right-the mirror remained a contested space.
What she found, and what she sings, is not a resolution. It is not the triumphant third act where you love every inch of yourself and post about it. It is something more liveable: the decision to stop being cruel. To lay down arms. To choose not to fight.
In a cultural moment saturated with wellness content that performs healing rather than enacts it, this kind of honesty registers as radical. "truce" does not ask you to love yourself. It asks only that you consider, gently, setting down the war.
That is, quietly, a form of play. Not play as productivity. Not play as self-improvement or transformation. Play as the decision to release the grip. To stop surveilling yourself so relentlessly. To exist in a body without requiring it to also be a verdict.
Julia Kate has been building her catalogue steadily since her debut EP just a kid (2022), crafted alongside producer Johnny What and musical collaborators Nick Rosen and Jacob Wick of Dreamers. Her second EP yearbook followed in 2023, and since the autumn of 2024, she has been releasing singles that grow her audience with each drop. Her previous single "i wish I knew (one more kiss)" remains her most-streamed original to date.
When she's home from Boston, she plays rooms like The Troubadour, The Hotel Café, The Whisky a-Go-Go. An artist still in formation, still in school, already making the kind of music that makes you feel seen in the dark.
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