An album that doesn’t offer repair, or forgiveness. But there are also writers who show up assuming anyone listening already knows what it is to crawl themselves back from one heartbreak, or to shout into an enduring darkness and hear only an echo. Little Oblivions is an album that details the crawling, details the shouting. And there are undoubtedly times when I have needed that to get from one sunrise to the next. There are writers who might attempt to bang at the doors of their listeners, shouting their particular anguish of the hour. Sonically, from the opening swells of sound on “Hardline” rattling the chest, loving but persistent jabs to the way “Relative Fiction” spills into “Crying Wolf,” which feels like speeding down a warm highway that quickly turns into a sparse landscape, drowning in a hard rain. It is hard to put into words what this feels like. Little Oblivions is an album that steps into that feeling and expands it. A writer who examines their own mess, not in a search for answers, but sometimes just for a way out.
What whispers in through the cracks of a person’s time alone. Julien Baker is one of those artists. There are musicians who know the nuances between the three. I have been lonely, I have been alone, and I have been isolated. The first time I ever heard Julien Baker, I wanted to know how an artist could survive such relentless and rigorous self-examination. To wrestle with the interior of one’s self has become a side effect of the times, and will remain a side-effect of whatever times emerge from these. If we have been unlucky enough, our own lifetimes have prepared us for the ever-growing tapestry of aches. In an era of hands pressed on the glass of windows, or screen doors. At the time of this writing, I shouldn’t want to run into the arms of anyone I love and miss, and yet I do. In the moment, here is a new Julien Baker album that arrives as a world comes to newly understand its relationship with touch, with distance. But it will also be a world defined by how many of us exist on the other side of distance. A world that, in whatever future moment exists, will likely be defined by the work people undertook and the fights people continued to show up for. If you are lucky enough to have a future where the present anxieties of distance become romantic memories, I hope there are people who turn this album over in their hands years from now and remember the world it tumbled into.
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