The singer and guitarist Julien Baker makes raw, ghostly rock music that’s rooted in personal confession. But, unlike some artists operating in that mode, she’s figured out how to turn fragility into a display of fortitude. Baker’s songs—which explore themes of self-sabotage, atonement, and restitution—are aching but tough. This stems, in part, from Baker’s spiritual upbringing. She was raised in a devout Christian family near Memphis, Tennessee, and sang in church. When she came out as gay, at seventeen, she prepared herself for a swift denunciation, but her parents were compassionate. (Her father began scouring the Bible for passages about acceptance.) It’s possible to hear the echoes of Christian hymnals in her first two albums—ideas of love and grace, mentions of God and rejoicing. Baker has a tattoo that reads “God exists” and has said that she senses a kind of divine presence in art, or, as she once put it, evidence of “the possibility of man to be good.”
Baker is now twenty-five, and is about to release her third album, “Little Oblivions.” The new songs are unruly, complex, and gorgeous. Baker made the record in Memphis, but it doesn’t feel especially linked to the city’s musical heritage, or at least not to the version (Elvis Presley’s Graceland, Sun Studio, Stax Records) that sells souvenirs and barbecue. “Little Oblivions” is Baker’s first record with a full-band sound—she plays most of the instruments herself—and the new material is suited to a bit of squall. (Her work brings to mind that of Sharon Van Etten and the National, two moody, transcendent acts that began in Brooklyn.) When Baker was fourteen, she formed a punk band, first called the Star Killers, and later Forrister; for years, it played scrappy venues around Memphis. She made her second album, “Turn Out the Lights,” at Ardent Studios, which is managed by Jody Stephens, the drummer in Big Star, a nineteen-seventies rock band often cited as an early progenitor of alternative music. On “Little Oblivions,” some of Baker’s early rebelliousness reëmerges. She’s made mistakes, and maybe even hurt people, but she hasn’t stopped believing in her own capacity for penance and redemption. “It’s the mercy I can’t take,” she sings, on a track called “Song in E.”
Baker is back in recovery—she first quit drinking and drugs in her late teens—and “Little Oblivions” is, in many ways, a wounded elegy for the blurry retreat of inebriation. Baker started smoking cigarettes when she was twelve, emulating the older kids at her bus stop, and then experimented with alcohol, weed, and prescription medication. It’s easy to overlook burgeoning addiction in a kid. She told GQ, in 2019, “That cultural categorization of substance abuse as the taboo but expected misbehavior of children contributed to me having a warped sort of denial.” These days, she is careful not to overstate the importance of her sobriety, telling Rolling Stone, last year, “I don’t want to construct a narrative of this sort of oscillating prodigal redemption.” Still, the truth of intoxication—how treacherously good it can feel to loosen one’s grip on reality, even briefly—is one of the central themes of the record. Baker is interested in the paradox of addiction: an addict most wants the thing that will eventually kill her. In this state, even death can seem like a welcome stasis. On a track called “Relative Fiction,” Baker surveys her choices:
The song starts out cloudy, and then, around two minutes in, drums appear. Baker’s vocals, deep and velvety, are bolstered by a rhythm section; it gives her phrasing power and confidence. “Ringside,” my favorite song on “Little Oblivions,” is one of its loudest. Baker’s voice rises above the din, like a diver suddenly emerging from the depths of a pool.
In 2014, as a student at Middle Tennessee State University, Baker recorded her first solo album, “Sprained Ankle.” It took her just two days (a friend secured her some time at Spacebomb Studios, in Richmond, Virginia), and she used only one microphone. Most of the vocals were captured in a single take. Pitchfork later suggested, lovingly, that the album sounded as if it might have been recorded in a bathroom. Baker posted the songs to Bandcamp, and, a year later, the indie label 6131 found, mastered, and formally released them. Even then, Baker was frank about her tendencies toward self-destruction: “I know I shouldn’t act this way in public,” she sings on “Good News,” an exquisitely sad ballad. Baker’s ability to be highly specific about the contours of her sorrow occasionally makes me think of Taylor Swift, and especially of Swift’s recent turn toward quiet, richly arranged folk songs. On “Good News,” Baker sings:
In 2018, Baker formed the trio boygenius with Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers. The group went on tour and released an acclaimed self-titled EP. (Baker’s sobriety began to slip after she returned from that tour.) Part of boygenius’s mission was to lampoon the limiting, often patronizing ways in which women artists are discussed (the three members are all in their mid-twenties, play guitar, and were once endlessly compared to one another) and to gently dunk on male privilege. Dacus told the Times, “If one person was having a thought—I don’t know if this is good, it’s probably terrible—it was, like, ‘No! Be the boy genius! Your every thought is worthwhile, just spit it out.’ ” Baker reunites with Dacus and Bridgers for “Favor,” a hazy, lonesome track on the new album. Like several of Baker’s best songs, it recounts a long, trying night attempting to reconcile with a partner. Baker worries about her capacity to return love. “How come it’s so much easier with anything less than human? / Letting yourself be tender? Well, you couldn’t make me do it,” she sings. “Doesn’t feel too bad, but it doesn’t feel too good, either.”
The cover of “Little Oblivions” features an oil portrait of Baker leaning back in a wooden chair, a wolf hovering nearby. The words “There’s no glory in love / Only the gore of our hearts”—from “Bloodshot,” the sixth track—are scrawled across the painting. The couplet is a useful key to unlocking the themes of her discography. For Baker, experiences that seem blissful or sweet tend to arrive with significant caveats: love leaves us vulnerable, unprotected, inelegant; it can make us feel burdensome and insufficient. The same can be said of intoxication, and sometimes it’s hard to know whether Baker is singing about romance or drugs. She asks, Did I make the people around me suffer? Can something be both nourishing and destructive? Can someone love me without needing to fix me?
The agonies of addiction are hardly new, but self-obliteration has never been a subject of greater obsession; somehow, America has managed to fetishize oblivion while also condemning it. Noise-cancelling headphones, sensory-deprivation tanks, meditation apps, nine-hundred-dollar ayahuasca retreats, weighted blankets, screen time: you’re encouraged to deaden the debilitating cacophony of modern life as long as you don’t start to like the fog too much. Baker’s songs expose this trap. “Until then I’ll split the difference between medicine and poison / Take what I can get away with while it burns right through my stomach,” she sings on “Hardline,” the opening track. The song starts with heavy organ chords, but, by the end, Baker seems to have arrived at something that resembles release. “What if it’s all black, baby, all the time?” she belts. She repeats the last part—“all the time”—until the meaning of the phrase falls away, and the only thing remaining is her voice. ♦
