The Julies – January

VINYL PRE-ORDER: Ships by February 27, 2026

For centuries, January has been a marker of beginnings, a reset point, a first step, and the moment when something new is set in motion. This is especially true for The Julies. Their earliest statement was January, a six-song cassette dropped in 1994 that set everything else in motion.

Drenched in guitar effects so evocative of the early nineties, January is noisy, dreamy, and unpolished in all the right ways. Gang of Four's Hugo Burnham, then an A&R rep at Qwest Records, captured the spirit of the tape perfectly when pressing play, his face twisting into an impossible mix of delight and disgust.

Raw but undeniable, January did its job. NYC's Lower East Side venues booked them regularly. The CMJ Conference and New Music Seminar invited them to feature in showcases. Major labels came calling. The legendary Seymour Stein sent reps from Sire Records to check out the band. They rubbed shoulders with Oasis.

Known to their earliest fans as, simply, "the blue tape," January also earned them a small, devoted base that would ultimately grow as the cassette made its way to Nashville and Flying Tart Records, who would put out the band's signature release Lovelife two years later. Decades later, the band's cult pull only grew, enough that reissues of the band's early work by Lost in Ohio helped spark a reunion and an unlikely new chapter.

Now, more than 30 years after its original release, January arrives on vinyl for the first time. Limited to 200 copies on black vinyl with distinctly DIY-inspired packaging, this is the document of a band before they knew what they were becoming—the rough sketch that contains all the DNA of what would follow.