This past Friday, Julien Baker released her third album, Little Oblivions to great critical praise. “Baker’s third-full length album vaults her into a whole new league,” said Variety, “and proves more than ever that she is a rare artist indeed.” Last night, she performed her single “Hardline” on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Watch it here. "Baker has the kind voice that stays in your ear long after the sound has passed through it: weighty with a cutting message, resonating like it traveled over a mountain to get to you,” says The Fader. "’Hardline’ has instrumentation to match, with one of the biggest choruses of the indie singer-songwriter's career. It's post-rock, it's shoegaze, it's pure catharsis."
On Thursday, March 25 she will perform her first streamed concert in support of the album. The show is taking place via STAGED, streaming pioneers Audiotree’s acclaimed virtual concert series. The fully-produced streaming concert will be broadcast from Nashville’s Analog (at Hutton Hotel), marking the first show from Nashville in the series. Three screenings will air on March 25 to ensure fans worldwide can tune in during prime time. Screening times are 8pm AEDT, 7pm GMT, and 9pm EDT. Tickets start at $15 and are available exclusively at https://audiotree.tv/streams. Each screening will be available for 24 hours after the completion of the show, on-demand, so fans can watch the show as many times as they'd like. Special guest Mini Trees will be the support for Julien Baker.
OFFICIAL ALBUM RELEASE STREAMING CONCERT
Thursday, March 25th
9PM EST / 8PM AEDT / 7PM GMT
Tickets begin at $15
Little Oblivions is the follow up to Baker’s 2017 sophomore album and first on Matador Turn Out The Lights. The New York Times said the LP is “the work of a songwriter who has resonated with an international audience (…), the rare second album that, despite new self-consciousness, stretches beyond an unspoiled debut to reach for even bigger things, with all its passion intact”. The Sunday Times said “the mix of detached vocals, lush arrangements and laid-bare post-mortems on love, loss, dysfunction and acceptance is devastating."
In 2018, Baker formed boygenius with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. The resulting eponymous EP and joint North American tour made for one of the most celebrated and talked about musical communions of that year, highlighting Baker at the forefront of a burgeoning generation of era-defining artists.
Baker shot to worldwide attention in 2015 with show-stopping debut, Sprained Ankle. Recorded in only a few days, it was a bleak yet hopeful meditation on identity, addiction, faith, resilience and redemption. An intense and immersive performer, her live shows were described by The New Yorker as “…. hushed, reverential. The only sounds you hear between songs are her fingers as she tweaks the tuning on her electric guitar, scattered whispers between friends, and the rustling as the crowd waits patiently for Baker to start strumming again”.
Baker has collaborated on studio recordings with Frightened Rabbit, Matt Berninger, Hayley Williams, Becca Mancari, Mary Lambert, and on stage with Justin Vernon, The National, Sharon Van Etten, Ben Gibbard, and others.
"With [‘Little Oblivions’] she scales her music up to larger spaces, backed by a full rock band with ringing guitars and forceful drums. But she doesn’t hide behind them; she’s still ruthless and unsparing, particularly about herself." NEW YORK TIMES
"Julien Baker is back with a stunning new solo album. Little Oblivions chronicles the missteps in life that can fill you with regret but also (hopefully) help you grow and be better." NPR MUSIC
"Unruly, complex, and gorgeous." THE NEW YORKER
"She’s rendering the details of her life with new clarity, crafting songs that anyone who struggles will recognize. And with “Little Oblivions,” she’s found a newly vivid musical setting that should help these stories reach more people who need them." WALL STREET JOURNAL
"Julien Baker's songwriting -- her showcasing of the minuscule details comprising her life and informing her sense of introspection -- will make any project she works on a must-listen; simply put, there are few artists working today with her stinging force. " BILLBOARD
"On her third album, Julien Baker’s self-lacerating storytelling gets a more expansive canvas to work with. The big, full-band sound makes all the small moments of pain surreptitiously devastating. " PITCHFORK
"Little Oblivions, Baker’s first solo album with percussion, is perhaps her most raw and unsparing yet." NEW YORK MAGAZINE
"It’s a rare artist who can create an album that you could put on and only occasionally notice the horrors lurking in its lyrics — and “Little Oblivions” proves more than ever that Julien Baker is a rare artist indeed." VARIETY
“Her most vulnerable album yet." ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
"One of the leading female singer-songwriters of her generation, both for her music’s muted grandeur and lyrics that seem to dive headlong into emotional chaos." ROLLING STONE
"Baker has the kind voice that stays in your ear long after the sound has passed through it: weighty with a cutting message, resonating like it traveled over a mountain to get to you. "Hardline" has instrumentation to match, with one of the biggest choruses of the indie singer-songwriter's career. It's post-rock, it's shoegaze, it's pure catharsis." THE FADER
"Baker explores her list of pains, staring down her tornado of experiences with stunning, present clarity...['Little Oblivions'] packs an immense emotional weight, her lithe vocals and vivid songwriting ensuring the songs bore ever deeper into the listener’s heart. A voracious reader of theology, philosophy and sociology, Baker’s lyrics find acute precision even in the uncertain examination of existence’s biggest questions." GRAMMY.COM
"One of the generation’s best emotional indie rock songstresses." SPIN
"Little Oblivions is the bleakest, brightest Julien Baker album yet....She continues to set her thoughtful confessionals to chords and melodies that emphasize the heart-wrenching beauty of her words, bringing the high drama of emo and post-rock to bear on singer-songwriter indie rock. But even as the Nashville-based artist ventures into some of her darkest lyrical territory yet, her arrangements explode with unprecedented life and color." STEREOGUM
"The record reflects Baker’s rejection of the dichotomy between body and mind. Her music has always delivered a punch to the gut, but this batch of songs finds new depths to that viscerality." WASHINGTON POST
"The album’s weighty grandeur is juxtaposed with sparkling melodies and a keen pop sensibility." GARDEN AND GUN
"For someone who’s only been on this earth for a quarter of a century, Baker makes the kind of music that feels as though she’s lived enough for three lifetimes; and all of them find a direct line to the listener’s heart." THE AV CLUB
"It’s the best work she’s ever done." CONSEQUENCE OF SOUND
"2020 needed more Julien Baker in it, and the emotive singer-songwriter came through." TEEN VOGUE
"In sharing her pain in slightly different ways throughout her growing body of work, whether via quiet guitar soundscapes or fist-in-the-air anthems, she’s becoming not only the most relatable artist of her generation, but also arguably its best." PASTE MAGAZINE
"“Hardline” “shows Baker taking leaps with her arrangements, working dramatic organ hits and other new-to-her sounds into the hugely climactic, sometimes post-rock-like track." UPROXX
"“Hardline” is the album’s opening track and is a good representation of the more expansive sound Baker has embraced on Little Oblivions, but it still showcases the raw emotions of Baker’s previous work." UNDER THE RADAR
"When Julien Baker sings, the people listen." MTV NEWS
"Baker’s guitar playing coils tightly and beautifully around her lyrics, which forthrightly tackle substance abuse, and the painful mental space it can occupy even for those who have managed to throw off its clutches." GUITAR WORLD
"Stunning” - NYLON
"Her finest work to date, sonically richer than her first two albums and full of devastating lyrics that’ll cut deep for anyone who has ever felt like they’re not living up to their own standards" INSIDEHOOK
"The most devastatingly beautiful album in recent memory" THE POST ATHENS
"With beautiful arrangements and a captivating bluntness, Little Oblivions is a wonderfully absorbing listen from beginning to end." METRO WEEKLY
"The 12-song record has a different energy and tonal language from her others, crackling with a hard-edged, unprocessed sound that suits the material and the moment." NASHVILLE SCENE
"The best parts of Baker’s music are the powerful, cathartic choruses of her songs, which wrestle with faith, love and personal salvation; the gravity of her latest will stick with you long after she delivers the final line." THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN
An essay on the album by poet, author, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib (Go Ahead In The Rain, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, A Fortune For Your Disaster) is below.
Little Oblivions
If you are lucky enough to have a future where the present anxieties of distance become romantic memories, I hope there are people who turn this album over in their hands years from now and remember the world it tumbled into. A world that, in whatever future moment exists, will likely be defined by the work people undertook and the fights people continued to show up for. But it will also be a world defined by how many of us exist on the other side of distance.
In the moment, here is a new Julien Baker album that arrives as a world comes to newly understand its relationship with touch, with distance. At the time of this writing, I shouldn’t want to run into the arms of anyone I love and miss, and yet I do. In an era of hands pressed on the glass of windows, or screen doors. An era of hands reaching back. An era where touch became an illusion. If we have been unlucky enough, our own lifetimes have prepared us for the ever-growing tapestry of aches.
To wrestle with the interior of one’s self has become a side effect of the times, and will remain a side-effect of whatever times emerge from these. The first time I ever heard Julien Baker, I wanted to know how an artist could survive such relentless and rigorous self-examination. I have been lonely, I have been alone, and I have been isolated. There are musicians who know the nuances between the three. What whispers in through the cracks of a person’s time alone. Julien Baker is one of those artists. A writer who examines their own mess, not in a search for answers, but sometimes just for a way out. A lighthouse to some newer, bigger mess.
It is hard to put into words what this feels like. Little Oblivions is an album that steps into that feeling and expands it. Sonically, from the opening swells of sound on “Hardline” rattling the chest, loving but persistent jabs to the way “Relative Fiction” spills into “Crying Wolf,” which feels like speeding down a warm highway that quickly turns into a sparse landscape, drowning in a hard rain. Lyrically, too, of course. There are writers who might attempt to bang at the doors of their listeners, shouting their particular anguish of the hour. And there are undoubtedly times when I have needed that to get from one sunrise to the next. But there are also writers who show up assuming anyone listening already knows what it is to crawl themselves back from one heartbreak, or to shout into an enduring darkness and hear only an echo. Little Oblivions is an album that details the crawling, details the shouting. An album that doesn’t offer repair, or forgiveness. Sometimes, though, a chance to revel in the life that is never guaranteed. Yes, the life that grows and grows and is never promised. How lucky to still be living, even in our own mess.
The grand project of Julien Baker, as I have always projected it onto myself, is the central question of what someone does with the many calamities of a life they didn’t ask for, but want to make the most out of. I have long been done with the idea of hope in such a brutal and unforgiving world, but I’d like to think that this music drags me closer to the old idea I once clung to. But these are songs of survival, and songs of reimagining a better self, and what is that if not hope? Hope that on the other side of our wreckage – self-fashioned or otherwise – there might be a door. And through the opening of that door, a tree spilling its shade over something we love. A bench and upon it, a jacket that once belonged to someone we’d buried. Birds who ask us to be an audience to their singing. A small and generous corner of the earth that has not yet burned down or disappeared. I can be convinced of this kind of hope, even as I fight against it. To hear someone wrestling with and still thankful for the circumstances of a life that might reveal some brilliance if any of us just stick around long enough.
Julien, how good it is to hear you again. And now, in all of our anguish and all of our glory. I miss the way the outside world reflected myself back to me. Now, I make mirrors out of the walls. I am so thankful for a better noise than the howling of my own shadows. Julien, you have done it again. You expert magician. You mirror-maker. Thank you for letting us once again watch you maneuver through all of your pleasant and unpleasant self-renderings. If there is a future, there will be people in it who might not remember how this album came at a time when so many hungered for a chance to put themselves back together. When the imagination of a person, a city, a country, was expanding. When, despite all of that, in the quiet moments, there were people who still wanted to be held by someone they maybe couldn’t touch. Thank you, Julien, for this comfort. This glass box through which a person might better be able to see a use for their own grief. This kingdom of small shards of sunlight, stumbling their way in to disrupt the darkness.
— Hanif Abdurraqib
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