The Emotional Blows of Little Oblivions
Julien Baker’s third album Little Oblivions is a 42-minute exercise in severe soul-searching with enough biting lines to fill an emo kid’s diary.
Baker released the album in March, following her 2017 sophomore release Turn Out the Lights and 2018’s boygenius EP with fellow indie superstars Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. These previous projects gave some esteem to Baker’s name, growing her audience while allowing for near-endless touring, but all at the cost of her sanity. In an interview with UPROXX, Baker talks about how the overly virtuous version of herself that appeared in her lyrics, was coming to a head with her inherently flawed actual self, heightened by increased media coverage and fans. Her sobriety slipped and the 25-year-old enrolled back in school with career doubts, but then COVID happened. In the worldwide downtime that ensued over the course of 2020, Baker turned back to song, but this time forced her pen to tell an accurate representation of herself. The result was lyrics that could cause anyone to cry in the middle of the afternoon, paired with her glossy, yearning voice that packs a punch.
Hardline, the first song on Little Oblivions, begins as organ chords blend into the album’s opening lines: blacked out on a weekday / still something I’m trying to avoid. Baker’s work is littered with a juxtaposition between religious imagery and sin, as the effects of growing up Christian, gay, and in the South have been lasting. She continues to grapple with these conflicting parts of her identity, as shown in Ringside where she asks: so Jesus, can you help me now? / trade me in for a briar crown. The same occurs in Ziptie, opening with the lines, “limping like a prodigal son / someone got my head in the slums.”
Perhaps the best example of Baker’s crossroads of moral piety and the sin of being human is displayed in the fourth track Relative Fiction. She asks, “do I get callous or do I stay tender?” This fraught decision reflects the dichotomy of mental illness, where one must choose if they descend into apathy as a form of self-preservation or remain delicate at the risk of breakdown. Later in the song she sings: cause I don’t need a savior, I need you to take me home and I’ve got no business praying / I’m finished being good. Relative Fiction allows Baker to step down from the pedestal and succumb to mere being, relieving herself from the pressure of performance while accepting a pleasurable defeat.
Alcoholism and addiction take up a significant amount of the lyrical content on Little Oblivions, partly in response to Baker’s shedding the weight of being characterized as “sober” in the media. Song in E is a dainty track that despite having the musical quality of a complex lullaby, is the opposite in every other way. The song opens as Baker painstakingly utters the lines:
I wish that I drank
Because of you and not only because of me
And then I could blame something painful enough
Not to make me look anymore weak
While in many ways it is liberating to come clean about faults and mistakes, there is also a side-effect of shame that comes hand in hand. Little Oblivions grapples with this conflict thoroughly, as Baker attempts to set the record straight, even at the sacrifice of her reputation.
Apart from religion and drinking, physical violence and brutality is a constant theme in Little Oblivions, becoming a metaphor for beating oneself up internally. Pitchfork began their review of the album saying, “Julien Baker turns being way too hard on yourself into its own genre,” and there is no shortage of examples to support this claim, perhaps most notably being the line “It's the mercy I can’t take” from Song in E. Ringside opens with the lines, “beat myself until I’m bloody / And I’ll give you a ringside seat,” with pounding drums that emulate a persistent flow of punches. In Favor, Baker sings:
It doesn’t feel too bad, but it
Doesn’t feel too good, either
Just like a nicotine patch, it
Hardly works, then it’s over
The escapism on the album consistently circles back to addiction, pain, and temporary solutions, but in a way, all these qualities can relate to her songs themselves. They are brief—the longest tracking in at four-and-a-half minutes, able to strike a nerve, and apt to be stuck in one’s head for days to come.
Baker may be writing about her personal trauma, but through the depth of her material, listeners cannot help but find themselves somewhere among her lines like a mutual sucker-punch. Her production and use of instrumentation on Little Oblivions are more grandiose than her previous records, giving the multi-instrumentalist more space to breathe and to counteract the harshness of her truths. It is really Baker’s lyrics that make her a force, as she not only stabs herself but twists the knife, resulting in some of the more gut-wrenching images in music today.