2018 saw Julien Baker link up with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus to form Boygenius, and now she’s ready to come back with her first new project since then. Today, the musician announced her third solo album, Little Oblivions, with a video for “Faith Healer.”
The track marks a musical expansion for Baker, as it’s more instrumentally fleshed out than her previous material. Press materials note that Baker played almost everything herself, too: “Baker’s tactile guitar and piano playing are enriched with newfound textures encompassing bass, drums, synthesizers, banjo and mandolin, with nearly all of the instruments performed by Baker.”
Baker says of the song:
“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. 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 “Faith Healer” video above, and find the Little Oblivions art and tracklist below.
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”
Little Oblivions is out 2/26/2021 via Matador Records. Pre-order it here.