After blowing us away with the release of Sprained Ankle, her debut full-length in 2015, singer Julien Baker is back with a follow-up called Turn Out The Lights. The first single, “Appointments,” is an inward-looking meditation on disappointment and doubt in the wake of a failed relationship. Turn Out The Lights is due out October. 27th on Matador Records.
Those of us who fell in love with her debut album, Sprained Ankle, have been hungering for more of Miss Baker’s sparse, confessional songs — brutally honest and cripplingly insecure, self-deprecating but laced with just enough hope to keep you hanging on — since the album’s 2015 release (only briefly sated by the release of “Funeral Pyre,” a one-off single, in January).
Baker is back with “Appointments,” the moving first single from her upcoming sophomore album, Turn Out The Lights. It gently treads over well-worn ground for Baker: hopefulness and hopelessness, mental health, emotional estrangement. The song is suspiciously optimistic, in Baker’s way: “Maybe it’s all going to turn out alright / And I know that it’s not / But I have to believe that it is,” she cries out over piano and twinkly guitars in the song’s climax.
This quiet compassion undergirds Baker’s music and allows her to write songs that are incredibly sad, without ever becoming maudlin or overwrought. You can trace hints of its source in Baker’s frequent invocation of the divine, and her deep faith in the holy sound of rock ‘n’ roll; regardless, it makes both her self-loathing and her moments of stability infinitely believable. “Appointments” is this way, too; it’s rooted in pain and the fear of failure, but it sounds like driving late at night, trying to convince yourself — and maybe whoever else is listening — that the small steps towards healing are worth it.
Turn Out The Lights will be Baker’s first album for Matador Records.
The Fat Angel Sings 