When Julia Shapiro returned to Seattle from her cancelled Chastity Belt tour in April 2018, everything felt chaotic and out of order. She was dealing with health issues, coming out of a bad relationship, and in the middle of an identity crisis. It was during the tour for her band’s third album, I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone, that she realized she had to go home and take a break from music. “I was really struggling; I was really depressed. I felt like I couldn’t sing or be a person,” Shapiro remembers. Fortunately, she found solace in her newly vacant one-bedroom apartment and decided to fulfill her long-awaited desire to record and mix her own music. The result of these trials and tribulations was her solo debut on Hardly Art, Perfect Version. Across its ten songs, she expresses her feelings of getting lost in the life she’s built for herself – feelings that are accompanied by sensuous guitars and warm, layered vocals.