Julia Cumming follows her solo album with the song Mom, I'm Going Back To Therapy

Julia Cumming has put out her first song since her debut solo record. Mom, I'm Going Back To Therapy follows Julia, the album that arrived earlier this year on Partisan, and it comes out under her own name rather than with Sunflower Bean, the band she sings in.

The production is deliberately at odds with what the song is about. Chris Coady and Brian Robert Jones give it twangy, upbeat, breezy 1970s guitars; underneath sit depression, self-pity and what Under the Radar describes as the strange fear of letting go of your own sadness.

The method behind that came from a book. Cumming says she wrote the lyrics after reading a collection of Dolly Parton's, drawn to how honest and approachable the writing was and to the way classic country can hold sadness and a joke in the same line so that the sadness lands harder. She has been working through that record collection all year.

What the song is actually about is more specific than its title suggests. Cumming describes realising you can be frightened of getting over your own sadness because you do not know who you become once it is gone, and says she used to fear that healing would leave an emptiness worse than the pain, because at least the pain belonged to her. Treating going back to therapy as an enormous dramatic decision, almost like taking a job in a coal mine, was the joke she built on top of it.

The country turn has been building publicly. She spent the summer covering The Roches' Hammond Song with Wolf Alice, part of a year exploring the 1970s singer-songwriter, folk and country records running underneath her solo work. That is a long way from Sunflower Bean's guitar music and close to where this song sits.

No album or further release is attached to it. Other indie writers stepping outside their bands have followed the same pattern this year, including Yaelokre's Keath Osk, who started a solo run with And The Hound. Anything dated appears on the release calendar.