Julien Baker will release her new album Little Oblivions on February 26 (Matador Records).
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.
To date Julien Baker has shared 3 singles from her forthcoming album Little Oblivions “Favor”, “Hardline” and “Faith Healer.” Fans can pre-order Little Oblivions here and the album will be available everywhere on February 26th (Matador Records).
During a recent at home performance for Seattle’s KEXP, Baker performed songs off of Little Oblivions as well as a cover of Soundgarden’s 1995 single “Fell On Black Days.” Watch the full session and interview with host Cheryl Waters here.
The New York Times included Little Oblivions in their “11 Things To Look Forward to In 2021,” column noting “How does a songwriter hold on to honest vulnerability as her audience grows....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.” Rolling Stone said “Little Oblivions' is not only the most richly produced, pop-aware release of Baker’s career, but also her the most unsparingly honest in its messiness” and Variety stated "While the basics of her autobiographical and cathartic songwriting style remain the same, the arrangements are far more fleshed out with multiple instruments, nearly all of which are played by Baker herself. Without pushing an obvious comparison too far, what Bridgers’ ‘Punisher’ was to 2020, ‘Little Oblivions’ is very likely to be to 2021."
Julien Baker performed, “Faith Healer,” on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last month. Filmed in Nashville, TN, Baker is backed by a full band, exemplifying the expansive sound that can be heard on the forthcoming album. Stereogum labeled the performance “stunning” while Rolling Stone noted, “Baker and her backing band moved through the expansive track and built steadily toward its final booming chorus. ‘Oh, faith healer,’ come put your hands all over me,’ Baker sings, pushing her voice to its stunning upper limits.” Calling Baker “one of the most powerful vocalists in all of music,” Uproxx labeled the performance a “powerhouse” - watch it here.
“Faith Healer” introduced the exhilarating, widescreen musical palette and infectious spirit of risk-taking found on Little Oblivions, a transformative sonic shift from Baker’s more spare and intimate previous work. Engineered by Calvin Lauber and mixed by Craig Silvey (The National, Florence & the Machine, Arcade Fire), both of whom worked with Baker on 2017’s Turn Out the Lights, the album was recorded in Baker’s hometown of Memphis, Tennessee between December 2019 and January 2020. Baker’s tactile guitar and piano playing are enriched with newfound textures encompassing bass, drums, synthesizers, banjo and mandolin, with nearly all of the instruments performed by Baker. The album weaves unflinching autobiography with assimilated experience and often hard-won observations from the past few years, taking Baker’s capacity for starkly galvanizing storytelling to breathtaking new heights.
In October the news of Little Oblivions upcoming release was a top 20 trending topic on Twitter and several special editions of the album (via Matador Records, Vinyl Me Please, Magnolia Record Club, 6131 Records, and Spotify) sold out almost instantaneously. Pre Orders have surpassed 6000 units and to date “Faith Healer” has amassed nearly 2.5 million streams.
"Julien is an artist who's always pushing herself and always growing, so it's always exciting to see what next step she's going to take and where it will take her." NPR MUSIC
"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
"While the basics of her autobiographical and cathartic songwriting style remain the same, the arrangements are far more fleshed out with multiple instruments, nearly all of which are played by Baker herself. Without pushing an obvious comparison too far, what Bridgers’ “Punisher” was to 2020, “Little Oblivions” is very likely to be to 2021." VARIETY
"We’ve been eagerly waiting for her next solo album, which will showcase that voice alongside her sharp songwriting." ROLLING STONE
"Mesmerizing" BILLBOARD
"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
"One of the generation’s best emotional indie rock songstresses." SPIN
"She just leaves you sitting with the terror and the beauty. She lets you feel it." STEREOGUM
"The album’s weighty grandeur is juxtaposed with sparkling melodies and a keen pop sensibility." GARDEN AND GUN
"Julien Baker remains devastating on new song "Faith Healer"" VULTURE
"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
"Ever-present on Little Oblivions is the breathtaking introspection of Baker, alone at a piano (“Song in E”), pouring her whole heart into her songs. They’re more fearless than ever, with instrumental scope to match that of their overwhelming emotions." 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
"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
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. MOJO called it “comforting as it is unsettling as it is cathartic”, while Pitchfork noted, “if you prefer redemption songs to sound as raw as they feel, Sprained Ankle could bring you to your knees”. The album went on to appear on many end of year lists.
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, Becca Mancari, Mary Lambert, and on stage with Justin Vernon, The National, Sharon Van Etten, Ben Gibbard, Hayley Williams and others.
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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