The Fat Angel Sings

With Turn Out The Lights, 21-year-old Julien Baker returns to a much bigger stage, but with the same core of breathtaking vulnerability and resilience. From its opening moments her chiming, evocative melody is accompanied by swells of strings —Turn Out The Lights throws open the doors to the world without sacrificing the intimacy that has become a hallmark of her songs. The album explores how people live and come to terms with their internal conflict, and the alternately shattering and redemptive ways these struggles playout in relationships. Baker casts an unflinching and accepting eye on the duality of –and contradictions in –the human experience, at times evenfinding humor and joy in the midst of suffering. She ultimately calls on her listeners to move beyond “good” and “bad,” or “happy” and “sad,” to embrace more complex truths.

The album was recorded at the legendary Ardent Studios in her hometown of Memphis, TN, and mixed by Craig Silvey (The National, Florence & the Machine, Arcade Fire). This evolution from her previous album Sprained Ankle’ intentionally sparse production allowed greater scope and freedom for Baker,who is still the album’s sole writer and producer. Strings and woodwinds now shade the corners of her compositions, and Baker takes to piano rather than guitar on several tracks. In songs like the epic “Claws In Your Back,” these new textures push Baker’s work to cinematic heights of intensity.

As always, the real draw is her songwriting and lyricism. Turn Out The Lights is more expansive in sound and vision than Sprained Ankle and illustrates significant growth, yet the album retains the haunting delicacy of her heart breakingly confessional style. Where her debut focused inward on Baker’s life and aspects of her identity, Turn Out The Lights reflects on not only her own experiences, but also the experiences of those closest to her.

The album is book ended by “Appointments” and “Claws in Your Back,” two songs that deal with the precarious balance between nihilism and realism. “A lot of stuff happened in my life that was rapid change, and it felt like it could not get any worse,” Baker says of “Appointments.” “I was like, I have reached critical mass for this amoeba of sadness and it cannot possibly turn out all right. But for the sake of my continuing to exist, I have to believe that it will.”

The resulting song (“I think if I ruin this, then I know I can live with it,” Baker sings) cuts to the core of Baker’s uniquely clear-eyedtake on human suffering.  On “Claws In Your Back,” she turns her own hard-won determination to thrive into a rallying cry for her friends(“I think I can love the sickness you made. I take it all back, I change my mind.I wanted to stay”).

Even as Turn Out The Lights explores broken relationships (“Sour Breath”), the search for a cure that may not exist (“Everything To Help You Sleep”), and the impossibility of ever truly understanding each other (“Shadowboxing”), Baker continually returns to the possibility of joy. “I don’t believe in the ‘fixing’ part, where what healing means is that you no longer get sad or experience grief or have panic attacks,” Baker says. “Happy is kind of a fleeting and transient emotion. It is not a destination that you can get to by exerting enough mental effort. I believe that joy is something that you can invite into your present circumstance. Whereas happiness seems to be this horizon that’s eternally getting further from you, joy is something that you can inhabit.”

It’s this call to joy even in moments of otherwise total darkness that makes her music a refuge for her fans. Turn Out The Lights is ultimately a healing experience, and it’s impossible not to feel Baker’s unyielding compassion for the messy and beautiful human experience. “When I talk about things in myself I find ugly and unlovable, they are the most effective tools for connecting with other people, for helping other people heal,” she says. “And that helps me heal.”

From the new album ‘Turn Out the Lights’ out October 27th on Matador Records

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).

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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.