Julience — Songs, Lyrics & Stories | Manchester Indie Rock

No Man’s Land

Julience — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:20:36 +0000

Out 4 September.

Pre-save it here: hypeddit.com/fui3tq
The song opens light. Someone throws out a line, hoping to catch a whale of a time, and for the first thirty seconds it reads like an ordinary night out. Then the floor drops. The friends stay for the good time. Someone else is standing in the corner of the room, crying, on her own.

What the narrator does about that is the odd part. He doesn’t comfort her. He doesn’t move her on either, and the lyric makes a point of saying so: *I could’ve told you to leave if I had no remorse, but I let it all slide.* Mercy by omission. That’s the full extent of the kindness on offer, and the song knows it.

The second verse explains why. He recognises her, because he has stood where she is standing. *I was once like you, doing all that I could just to catch a glimpse of the life that I knew was there.* And then the line the whole thing is built on:

I only got one reason to really care about the things that you think of me, when I don’t even care for myself.

That’s the real subject. Not heartbreak, not a break-up. The hollow spot where self-regard is supposed to be, and what happens to your relationship with everybody else once it’s empty.

The chorus asks a question and then declines to answer it. *Is this the end of the world, or did we just get lost in No Man’s Land.* No Man’s Land is the ungoverned stretch between who you were and who you’re going to be. Nobody’s territory, no map, but survivable. Being lost and being finished are two different states, and most of the optimism in this song lives in that gap.

One more thing, for anyone who likes to find these: *She said I.* It appears twice, and both times it gets cut off. She starts the sentence and never finishes it. A thought that never completes is more or less the condition of the whole song.

How it was made

Everything you hear on the record is me. Bass guitar, electric guitar, drum kit, keyboards. Mid-tempo rock, guitars up front, no session players and no borrowed parts.

I also mixed and mastered this one myself, which is the part I was most nervous about. Handing a track to someone else at the mix stage means you get a second pair of ears and a second opinion about what the song is. Doing it yourself means the record sounds exactly like the thing in your head, including the bits that maybe should have been argued with. I’d rather live with that.

Hear the demo before you hear the record

There’s a free download of the demo version at julience.com/free-demo. It’s the rough one, recorded before any of the decisions were made about what the song would become.

Take it, play it, then play the finished version on 4 September and see what changed. Most of what I do happens between those two files, and almost nobody ever gets to hear both.

About the pre-save

Here is the honest version of why artists ask for this, because a lot of the language around it is nonsense.

When you pre-save a track, it drops into your Spotify or Apple Music library automatically the morning it comes out. You don’t have to remember the date or go looking for it. That’s the whole listener-facing benefit, and it’s a real one.

The reason it matters on my end is narrower than most people claim. Streaming platforms watch what a track does in its first day or two, and the signal they weight most heavily is saves, not plays. A play can be an accident. A save is somebody deciding they want it again. When a cluster of saves arrives on day one, the track becomes eligible for the algorithmic places where new listeners actually turn up: Release Radar for people who already follow me, and after that, possibly Discover Weekly and the autoplay queues.

Two caveats worth stating plainly. A pre-save doesn’t count as a stream, only as a save, so it doesn’t inflate any numbers. And none of this guarantees anything. It’s a nudge, not a lever. For a project with no ad budget and no playlist money, nudges are what there is.

If you want to help beyond pre-saving: play it through on release day, and add it to one of your own playlists. That combination does more than anything else available to you, and it costs nothing.

Pre-save No Man’s Land: hypeddit.com/fui3tq
Free demo download: Free Demo Download

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Fifty Thousand Plays

Julience — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:29:15 +0000

Fifty thousand plays. That’s what it takes before one song pays for itself. Here’s the arithmetic, and why I’d rather you bought the record.

Getting a song mixed and mastered properly costs somewhere around $150. That’s not the recording — that’s just the last stretch, where a track stops sounding like a demo and starts sounding like a record.

Spotify pays out roughly $0.003 per stream. Divide one by the other and you get 50,000.

Fifty thousand plays so that one song breaks even on its final polish. Not profits. Not the guitar strings, the interface, the time. Just the mixing bill.

What 50,000 actually looks like

It’s hard to picture a number that size, so here it is in time. Fifty thousand plays of a four-minute track is 200,000 minutes. That’s over 3,300 hours. One person listening around the clock, no sleep, no pause, for 138 days.

For a ten-song album, the figure climbs to half a million streams — before I’ve paid for recording, artwork, or the room I made it in.

I’m not saying this to complain about Spotify. Streaming is how most people find music now, including how most people find mine, and I’d rather be heard than not. But it’s worth being clear-eyed about what it is: a discovery service that happens to pay a little, not an income.

The other side of the sum

Here’s what makes a purchase feel different from this end.

If you buy the album on Bandcamp for $3.99, I keep somewhere around $3.40 after their cut. To reach that same $3.40 through streaming, at three-tenths of a cent a play, would take roughly 1,133 streams.

One purchase. Eleven hundred plays. Same money.

Put another way: if you buy the album once, you’ve done more for the next release than you could by playing it on repeat for a fortnight.

An honest caveat

That $0.003 figure isn’t a fixed rate, and anyone who tells you otherwise is simplifying. Spotify doesn’t pay per stream at all — it pools subscription revenue and divides it by total plays across the platform, so the number moves month to month and shifts depending on which country you’re listening from and whether you’re on a paid account.

Some months it’s better than $0.003. Some months worse. The point isn’t the decimal place. The point is that the gap between a stream and a purchase is roughly three orders of magnitude, and no amount of rounding closes it.

Why I’m telling you this

Not as a guilt trip. Stream the music. Put it on in the car, add it to a playlist, leave it running while you work — that’s what it’s for, and I’d rather have the play than the silence.

But if you’ve listened to something here more than once, and you’ve wondered whether it makes any difference which button you press: it does. Buying on Bandcamp isn’t charity. It’s the only route I’ve found that makes the next record possible without going broke on the last one. Same with Subvert, for what it’s worth — anywhere the money arrives without passing through six sets of hands first.

No label, no budget, no paid promotion. Just one bloke in Manchester who’d like to keep going.

Have a listen on Bandcamp

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Are Song Lyrics Important?

Julience — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:01:51 +0000

Every song is a bundle of moving parts — melody, rhythm, tone, production — and they all pull at us in their own way. But the part I keep coming back to, both as a listener and when I’m writing my own songs, is the lyrics. They’re the words that carry the story, the emotion, and whatever the song is really trying to say.

So are they just something to hang on the melody, or do they matter more than that? I’ve spent a lot of hours on both sides of this — humming a tune with no idea what the words are, and being completely undone by a single line — and I’ve landed somewhere in the middle. Here’s where.

An Emotional Connection

The clearest thing lyrics do is connect. The right words at the right moment can make you feel joy, grief, anger, love — sometimes all in one song. They can make a listener feel understood, and on a bad day they can feel like company.

That’s what pulls me in when I write. A melody sets the mood, but the words tell you why you’re feeling it. When I wrote “Don’t Say Goodbye,” the whole song came down to one idea — that some doors weren’t meant for closing. Get a line like that right and you don’t have to explain the feeling; the listener already has it.

Storytelling and Narrative

Lyrics are also a storyteller’s pen. They give a song a shape — a beginning, a turn, somewhere to land — and that structure is often what makes it stick.

Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’” is the obvious example: a few verses that somehow hold an entire decade of rebellion, progress, and hope. Adele’s “Someone Like You” does it from the opposite direction — no politics, just heartbreak told so plainly that it feels like she’s reading your own memory back to you. Different worlds, same trick: the words do the carrying.

Message and Meaning

Beyond feeling and story, lyrics can carry an argument. They can take on love, loss, growth, injustice — and when they hit, they don’t just entertain, they change the conversation.

Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” became anthems of the civil rights movement precisely because their words named something people were living through. You can dance to a lot of songs; only some of them make you think while you do.

Memorability

Then there’s the simple pleasure of a line you can’t shake. “Is this real life? Is this just fantasy?” — you didn’t even have to hear the melody to know the song. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” is stuffed with phrases that leapt out of the record and into everyday speech.

A lot of that comes down to craft: an easy melody, a chorus that repeats, a hook that fits the mouth. It’s also why singing along matters — there’s a real joy in a room full of people landing on the same line at the same time.

But Lyrics Aren’t the Whole Story

Of course, words aren’t the only thing that moves us. Plenty of songs win on sound alone. Some listeners live for the storytelling — the Dylans, the Leonard Cohens, the Adeles — and follow a song wherever the words go. Others chase the melody, the rhythm, the feel, and are perfectly happy for the lyrics to ride in the back seat. Madonna, Daft Punk, and BTS have built huge careers on hooks and grooves that don’t need a poem to land.

Genre shapes it too. Folk, country, and hip-hop tend to put the words up front and expect a lot of them. Electronic and a lot of pop lean harder on production and sound. Neither is wrong — they’re just different ways of reaching the same place.

So — Are They Important?

To me, yes — even when they’re not the point. Lyrics leave room for you to read yourself into a song, to feel understood, to remember it long after it’s over. Whether you’re in it for the poetry or the beat, the words are quietly doing a lot of the work.

That’s the part I care about most when I sit down to write. If a line of mine ever lands with you the way those songs land with me, then it did its job.

— Julience

If you’d rather read one than read about them

Black Sheep has its lyrics on the page, and there’s a separate piece on why it was written. Both are short.

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Some Doors Weren’t Meant for Closing — “Don’t Say Goodbye” Is Out! 🎶

Julience — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:54:17 +0000

New Single Out Now

I’m happy to let you know that my new single, “Don’t Say Goodbye,” is finally out in the world.

This one’s a bit of a shift from the last release. Where Black Sheep leaned into raw, riff-driven rock and roll, “Don’t Say Goodbye” goes somewhere warmer and a little more tender. It’s an up-tempo pop/rock ballad built around acoustic guitar, piano, and vocals — the kind of song that carries you along and stays with you after it ends.

At its heart it’s about holding on. About the moments where letting go feels easier than staying, and choosing to stay anyway. Because some doors weren’t meant for closing.

Take a Listen

You’ll find all the links on my website at julience.com, or head straight to the song here:

Stream / download: Listen to “Don’t Say Goodbye”
Lyric video: Watch & sing along on YouTube
More about the song: Read the story behind it

If you like reading along while you listen, the lyric video is the way to go.

A Small Favour

Release day is when everything counts. A few minutes of your time genuinely helps a small artist like me get noticed by the streaming algorithms — and it costs nothing at all. So if the song lands with you:

Give it a play (all the way through, if you can)
Follow me on your favourite platform
Add it to a playlist — even a personal one makes a difference

That’s it. No pressure, no hard sell. Just gratitude if you do.

Thank you for listening, for sharing, and for sticking around. It means more than you know.

— Julience

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The Light in the Hall

Julience — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 21:06:02 +0000

I went quiet for a year and a half.

I didn’t plan it that way, but sometimes you have to step away from the noise to figure out what you’re actually trying to say.
The machinery of it all—the algorithms, the constant demand to be visible, the streams that never translate into real people—it gets loud. I needed quiet.

But there’s a difference between quiet and finished.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about pride versus repair.
About who climbs down first.
About the unsent texts and the rooms kept quiet just because neither person wants to be the one to break the silence.

When is holding on devotion, and when is it just a mistake?

I write music to say the things that matter before they go unsaid.
To catch you in the moment before a door closes and tip you toward holding on.

The last five songs were me walking back down the hall.
Rebuilding this thing one real listener at a time, without the machinery.

On July 17, I’m releasing a new song called “Don’t Say Goodbye” on Bandcamp.
On July 24, It will become available on all streaming services

If the last five songs were the walk back, this one is stepping through the door.
It’s about refusing to let distance have the last word.
It’s for anyone who knows that some doors weren’t meant for closing.

I’m not chasing anything with this release.
I’m just putting it out there for the people who need it.

Thank you for leaving the light on.

Thank you for being here.
— Julience

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My New EP Just Landed on Subvert: Here’s Why I’m Trying It Out

Julience — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:26:15 +0000

I just joined Subvert — and to mark it, I’ve released a brand-new 5-song EP there, available as a full EP or as five standalone tracks, however you like to listen. This isn’t me leaving anywhere; think of it as a side door. But I wanted to explain what Subvert actually is and why I think it’s worth having music on it alongside everything else.

What is Subvert?

Subvert is a music marketplace owned by the people who use it. Not a venture fund, not a private equity shop, not a game publisher — the artists, labels, and supporters who sign up as members. It launched as a direct answer to what happened to Bandcamp: first acquired by Epic Games in 2022, then sold again to Songtradr in 2023, a deal that came with layoffs and the dissolution of Bandcamp’s union. Watching a platform built on “artist-friendly” values get flipped twice in two years was a wake-up call for a lot of musicians, myself included.

Subvert’s answer is structural, not just a marketing promise: it’s a cooperative. Members vote on how the platform runs, and there’s no outside buyer who can quietly change the rules or sell the whole thing out from under the community. It launched with tens of thousands of artists, labels, and supporters already signed on from more than 120 countries, and the co-op has voted for 0% platform fees on sales, with buyers able to chip in extra at checkout to help fund operations instead.

Why it’s a big deal for independent artists

For those of us releasing music without a label machine behind us, the math matters. Keeping 100% of what a fan pays for your music, instead of losing a cut to a platform, is not a small thing when you’re funding your own recording, mixing, and artwork. Beyond the money, there’s the governance piece: decisions about fees, features, and policy get made by a vote of the membership, not by a board answering to shareholders. That means the platform can’t quietly pivot toward ads, algorithmic feeds, or extraction the moment growth slows down, because the people it would extract from are the ones who own it.

It’s also just a healthier bet long-term. A co-op can’t be acquired the way a startup can. If you’re building a catalog and a fanbase over years, that stability is worth something.

Why it’s worth a look if you just love music

Even if you never plan to release anything yourself, Subvert is worth poking around. It’s built for actually buying music — downloading it, owning it, not renting access to it through a subscription that could raise prices or vanish tomorrow. Every purchase goes straight to the artist and the co-op that supports them, not to a platform trying to squeeze margin out of both sides. And because it’s still early, browsing feels a bit like digging through record store bins before an algorithm decided what everyone should hear — a real chance to find something new before it’s trending.

If that sounds interesting, you can check out my page and grab the new EP (or just the songs you like) at subvert.fm/julience. Nothing else changes — you can still find me in the usual places too. And if you’re an artist curious about giving Subvert a try yourself, happy to talk about it — just reach out.

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You Deserve to Know What You’re Listening To

Julience — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:01:33 +0000

There’s a number that’s been sitting with me all day.

According to new research from the Dutch music industry, more than three-quarters of people in the Netherlands now want AI-generated music to carry a label on streaming platforms.
Two years ago, that figure was 59 per cent.
Today it’s past 75. And in the same stretch, the share of people who say it matters that music is made by a real person climbed from 68 to 78 per cent.

I read that and thought: finally.
Not because I want to win an argument.
Because it means I’m not shouting into the void.

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know my line in the sand: 100% Human, Zero AI.
Every word, every melody, every imperfect take.
I’ve never treated that as a marketing slogan.
It’s the whole point.
So watching the country I was born in arrive at the same instinct — that authenticity is worth protecting — feels less like vindication and more like company.

Here’s the scale of what we’re up against.
One major streaming service says roughly 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks get uploaded every single day.

That’s nearly half of everything new arriving on the platform.
Half.
Think about what that does to a listener trying to find something real.
You’re not browsing a record shop anymore.
You’re wading through a flood, and most of it was never touched by a human hand.

The people pushing for change put it better than I could.
Transparency matters. Listeners have a right to honest information — to know where the thing they’re feeling actually came from.
That’s it. That’s the ask. Not a ban, not a witch hunt.
Just a label, so you can choose with your eyes open.

What moved me most wasn’t the AI part, though. It was the vinyl part.

The same research found people are buying records again — not chasing the newest release, but returning to music they already love, so they can experience it again.
Hold it. Put the needle down. Sit with it.

One spokesperson framed it perfectly: the more we live online, and the more AI rises, the more we crave something real.

The more we want to actually feel a thing, rather than have it fed to us by an algorithm that’s optimising for retention.

That’s the deepest reason I do this the way I do.
A song isn’t a product I’m trying to scale.
It’s an attempt to hand you something true — written at a kitchen table, second-guessed, rewritten, sung until it was right.
When you press play on a ‘Julience’ track, a person was there.
I was there.

So if you’ve ever wondered why I make such a stubborn fuss about the human thing, this is why. Three-quarters of my birth country just said the quiet part out loud.
You want to know what you’re listening to.
You deserve to!

And with me, you always will.

Stay human.

— Julience

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The Algorithm Almost Buried These Songs

Julience — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:10:59 +0000

What Spotify’s hidden Popularity Score reveals about how independent music really gets discovered — and why the first few weeks decide everything.

I took a look at Spotify’s Popularity Scores recently, and what they reveal is worth sharing — not as a complaint, but as an honest look at how the discovery game actually works for an independent artist.

The hidden score behind every song

Spotify quietly gives every track and artist a hidden score from 0 to 100. Think of it as a credit score for your music. It isn’t lifetime streams. From what artists have pieced together over the years, it’s heavily recency-weighted — it rewards a burst of plays right after release far more than a slow trickle over time.

The rough consensus among independent musicians is that crossing into the 30s is roughly where Spotify’s algorithm starts working in your favour: feeding you into Discover Weekly and larger editorial and algorithmic playlists. None of this is officially published, so treat the exact numbers as informed estimates rather than gospel. But the underlying pattern — that early momentum matters enormously — is something almost every indie artist recognises.

Where JULIENCE sits today

Here’s a snapshot of the JULIENCE catalogue’s scores (June 2026):

Love Lies Cold 25%
Time Is A Weapon 25%
Port to Port (The Lonesome Sailor) 22%
The Road Less Travelled 20%
Black Sheep 15%

JULIENCE — Spotify popularity scores (June 2026). The dashed line marks the ~30% threshold where algorithmic discovery tends to kick in.

The pattern that repeats

Look at the top four — they’re all older songs. They’re sitting at a respectable 20–25% now, but they were nowhere near these numbers in the first few weeks after release, when it actually counts. By the time the algorithm noticed them, the early window had already closed. The scores look decent on paper today, but the momentum wasn’t there when Spotify’s system was deciding whether to push them.

That’s the quiet reality for most independent artists. The work doesn’t fail on quality — it fails on timing. A song can be genuinely good and still slip past the moment that would have carried it to new listeners.

Why the first weeks matter

The most recent release, Black Sheep, is a live example of this in motion. It came out on 1 June 2026 and currently sits at 15%. The weeks immediately after a release are the rare window where a single play genuinely moves the needle — where real listeners, not the algorithm’s mood, decide whether a song gets a fair shot.

That’s the whole point of writing this. These scores are public if you know where to look, and they tell a more honest story than the headline “streams” number ever does. Independent music lives or dies by real listeners showing up early — and that’s something anyone can be part of.

If you’ve ever wanted to actually help an independent artist break through, the most useful thing you can do is listen early and share what you love.

Listen to JULIENCE on Spotify

And I’d love to know: what’s your favourite JULIENCE track?
Tell me in the comments.

#Spotify #IndieArtist #MusicDiscovery #BlackSheep #Julience

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Indie Pulse — A New Home for Real Music

Julience — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:35:24 +0000

There’s a quiet revolution happening outside the algorithm. And I’m thrilled to be part of it.

If you’ve ever felt like the music you hear on the big platforms is starting to sound the same — over-polished, over-processed, picked by an algorithm trained to play it safe — you’re not imagining it. The system has been built that way. The majors gatekeep the playlists, the algorithms favour what’s already winning, and we’re now being told AI-generated tracks are the future.

I disagree. So does Indie Pulse.

What is Indie Pulse?

Indie Pulse is an independent music platform and broadcast — created and hosted by Terrence Bull, himself an indie artist who’s living what he champions. The mission is simple and uncompromising: spotlight the world’s best high-quality indie music. Real people. Real songs. No label approval. No AI.

Every track on Indie Pulse is hand-picked. Not surfaced by an engagement metric. Not promoted because someone paid for it. Hand-picked — because someone listened, felt something, and decided this deserves to be heard.

The flagship is The Pulse — a live broadcast every Tuesday at 8:05pm NZT, with previous shows available on demand so you can listen any time. There’s also Backstage, where you get closer to the artists behind the music.

Why this matters

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: no label, no AI, no shortcuts. Just one bloke making real music. Indie Pulse is built on the same belief — that craft still counts, that human voices belong on the airwaves, and that the artists pouring their lives into their work deserve a platform that actually puts them first.

This isn’t anti-Spotify or anti-Apple Music. It’s in addition to. Initiatives like Indie Pulse are part of a growing wave of platforms creating space for independent music outside the major-streaming sphere — and that wave is exactly what indie artists need right now. More homes for honest music. More ways for listeners to find something real.

You can find me there too

I’m proud to be on Indie Pulse. If you want to check out my artist profile, give a few tracks a spin, and explore the rest of the catalogue while you’re there:

My Indie Pulse Profile →

And if you love what Indie Pulse is doing — tune in, share it, send it to a mate. That’s how this works. Platforms like this grow on word of mouth, on real listeners passing real music along.

Tune in to Indie Pulse

The Pulse — live Tuesdays, 8:05pm NZT, with full archive on demand.

indiepulse.woo.co/the-pulse

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Why I Wrote Black Sheep

Julience — Sun, 31 May 2026 17:31:08 +0000

For most of my adult life, I’ve had this quiet, nagging sense that I showed up at the wrong time, in the wrong place. Like the world had already settled into a shape and I was the one piece that wouldn’t slot in. The Beach Boys put it perfectly years ago — I just wasn’t made for these times. That line has followed me around like a shadow.

Black Sheep is the song I finally wrote about it.

The lyrics talk about “reach-me-down genes passed down the family / like second hand rag dolls and Playmobil.” That’s not just imagery for me. It’s the feeling of inheriting a life that doesn’t quite fit — hand-me-down everything, including a sense of not belonging that I couldn’t shake no matter how hard I tried. So at some point I stopped trying to fit, and started writing instead.

There was a band, once. I couldn’t hold it together. There was school, too — I never finished it the first time around. I was the dropout, the pain in the neck the teachers warned about, the one whose name got said in a slightly lower voice. For a long time those felt like failures stacked on top of each other. “Thirty-two years of bad luck and shame,” more or less.

The strange turning point came when I had nothing to show for myself. I left for Manchester with no credentials, no plan worth the name — and for the first time, I felt like I belonged somewhere. It wasn’t a clean fairy tale after that. There were still ups and downs, plenty of them. But eventually I finished school, earned the diploma, found work, found a place to settle. And in 2022 I started making music again.

That’s really the heart of why this song exists. Black Sheep isn’t a sad song, even though it’s built out of things that used to make me feel small. It’s a song that takes society’s rejection and turns it into a rallying cry. The black sheep in this story doesn’t apologise — he announces himself. Chest out, guitars ragged, a four-count war drum kicking the whole thing into gear. The chorus doesn’t ask anyone for acceptance. It dares you to look away.

I wanted it to sound exactly like that feeling: punk-edged, defiant, a little reckless. Not polished into something palatable. Because the point isn’t “please let me in.” The point is “I’m here, I made it this far, deal with it.”

If you’ve ever felt like the odd one out — in your family, your town, your own skin — this one’s for you. Maybe you’re a black sheep too. Maybe that’s not the curse it gets made out to be. Maybe it just means you were never going to follow the herd in the first place.

I might be the black sheep of the family. But I’m still alive and kicking. And now I’ve got a song to prove it.

Black Sheep is out June 1, 2026

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