Julien Baker announces ' Little Oblivions' + releases "Faith Healer"

Today, Julien Baker has announced that she will be releasing her third studio album, Little Oblivions, on February 26th via Matador Records. The album is their follow-up to 2017’s critically-acclaimed release, Turn Out the Lights.

Little Oblivions was recorded in Baker’s hometown of Memphis, Tennessee between December 2019 and January 2020. Engineered by Calvin Lauper and mixed by Craig Silvey (The National, Florence + the Machine, Arcade Fire), both of whom worked with Baker on Turn Out the Lights, Little Oblivions 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.

Additionally, Baker has released a brand new song called “Faith Healer,” giving fans their first taste of the new album. “Faith Healer” introduces 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.

“Put most simply, I think that ‘Faith Healer’ is a song about vices, both the obvious and the more insidious ways that they show up in the human experience. I started writing this song 2 years ago and it began as a very literal examination of addiction,” Baker says. “For awhile, I only had the first verse, which is just a really candid confrontation of the cognitive dissonance a person who struggles with substance abuse can feel– the overwhelming evidence that this substance is harming you, and the counterintuitive but very real craving for the relief it provides. When I revisited the song I started thinking about the parallels between the escapism of substance abuse and the other various means of escapism that had occupied a similar, if less easily identifiable, space in my psyche.”

“There are so many channels and behaviors that we use to placate discomfort unhealthily which exist outside the formal definition of addiction. I (and so many other people) are willing to believe whomever– a political pundit, a preacher, a drug dealer, an energy healer– when they promise healing, and how that willingness, however genuine, might actually impede healing.”

Watch the Daniel Henry-directed music video for “Faith Healer” below.