Julien Baker has announced a new album. It’s called Little Oblivions and it arrives February 26, 2021 via Matador. The singer-songwriter has also shared the first preview from the record, ‘Fait Healer’, which comes alongside a music video directed by Daniel Henry. Check it out below, and scroll down for the album’s cover artwork and tracklist.
“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,” Baker said of the track in a press release. “I started writing this song 2 years ago and it began as a very literal examination of addiction. 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.”
She added: “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.”
Little Oblivions, the follow-up to 2017’s Turn Out the Lights, was recorded in Baker’s hometown of Memphis, Tennessee between December 2019 and January 2020. Calvin Lauber engineered the record, while Craig Silvey (The National, Florence & the Machine, Arcade Fire) handled the mixing.
Little Oblivions Cover Artwork:
Little Oblivions Tracklist:
1. Hardline
2. Heatwave
3. Faith Healer
4. Relative Fiction
5. Crying Wolf
6. Bloodshot
7. Ringside
8. Favor
9. Song in E
10. Repeat
11. Highlight Reel
12. Ziptie