Julien Baker - Little Oblivions

A dazzling record with a crushing sense of beauty...

“You say it isn’t cut and dry, oh it’s not all black and white,” *Julien Baker* sings at the outset of ‘Little Oblivions’. “What if it’s all black, baby, all the time?”

Since 2015’s ‘Sprained Ankle’, appropriately, the Tennessee songwriter has built a catalogue of songs that explore the range of coloured bruises, grey zones, and emotional fractures sustained across a lifetime, observed up close in painful detail. On her third album, the view has swung from microcosm to breathtaking panorama.

It’s also louder. ‘Ringside’ is all soft-rock euphoria, while the bass-drum that arrives during ‘Repeat’ evokes her boygenius bandmate Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘I Know The End’. On ‘Hardline’, the effect is overwhelming; crushingly beautiful, it is perhaps Baker’s finest moment.

There are periods of reprieve: ‘Heatwave’ and ‘Favor’ feel simultaneously darker and cosier than the rest of the record. But it’s hard not to long for that dazzling brightness again, the hearts-on-sleeves yearning, as if one day the greys might finally wash away forever.

*9/10*

Words: *Matthew Neale*

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