Julien Baker has unveiled her highly-anticipated new album Little Oblivions. Stream it below via Apple Music and Spotify.
As she did on her first album, 2015’s Sprained Ankle, and the 2017 follow-up, Turn Out the Lights, Baker wrote, performed, and produced every track. The biggest difference this time around might be Baker herself. In 2018, she formed boygenius with Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers, and their powerful self-titled debut introduced each artist to new fans and fresh approaches to songwriting.
Still, despite everything good that’s come from her career, Baker lived through a “really difficult year,” and she sees Little Oblivions as a “pretty pessimistic record.” As she explained in an interview with Consequence of Sound on Kyle Meredith with…,
“I wrote this record over the course of 2019, maybe a little bit of 2018. It was a really difficult year for me personally, professionally, emotionally. It’s weird, because I made this record and I made all these assertions about myself to see the furthest that I could go into self-examination being a confrontation of the negative things about me I was trying to hide, you know? Or that I was trying to subdue, or suppress, or that were humiliating me, you know. I really thought this was a very dark record… I guess it is a record with a lot of songs of surviving and imaging a better self, even if I think it’s a pretty pessimistic record.”
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Listen to the full effort ahead, and order physical versions via Matador.
Previously, Baker shared the singles “Faith Healer”, “Hardline”, “Heatwave”, and “Favor” with Dacus and Bridgers. Earlier this week, she covered Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place”. On March 2nd, she’ll participate in Sound Mind Live’s Unwound & Unplugged livestream.
Also revisit her recent appearance on Going There with Dr. Mike, where she spoke candidly about her history with depression and OCD.
Little Oblivions Artwork:
Little Oblivions Tracklist:
01. Hardline
02. Heatwave
03. Faith Healer
04. Relative Fiction
05. Crying Wolf
06. Bloodshot
07. Ringside
08. Favor
09. Song in E
10. Repeat
11. Highlight Reel
12. Ziptie