Julien Baker

Bartlett, church music, and a debut made at university

Julien Rose Baker was born on 29 September 1995 in Germantown, Tennessee, and grew up in Bartlett, on the eastern edge of Memphis, in a devout Baptist family. Her earliest performing was done in church, and the alternative and punk records that reshaped her playing — Green Day, My Chemical Romance — arrived afterwards rather than instead. That order of events matters to the music: the hymn-shaped melodic writing came first and never left, and the loud guitars were laid over the top of it.

Her debut album, Sprained Ankle, appeared in October 2015 while she was still a student at Middle Tennessee State University. It is a record of mostly one voice and one electric guitar, recorded without much in the way of production gloss, and it ended the year on a long list of critics' polls. The reception was large enough that Matador Records signed her off the back of it. In February 2024 the same university named her an honorary professor.

Baker relocated to Los Angeles in 2023, though her work has stayed tied to Tennessee studios and Tennessee rooms — a point underlined this September, when the first thing she did after a long public silence was book a surprise show in Nashville.

Three solo albums, each with more band on it

Turn Out the Lights, released in 2017, was the Matador debut and the first record where the arrangements opened out: strings, piano, more space around the guitar, and a set of songs built to crest rather than simply accumulate. It confirmed that the austerity of Sprained Ankle had been a starting condition rather than a style.

Little Oblivions followed in 2021 and went further again, trading the solo-performer framing for full-band arrangements. It became her first album to reach the top 40 of the Billboard 200. It is also, as of this autumn, still her most recent solo album — the gap between it and whatever comes next has run past five and a half years, which is the central fact of her career at the moment.

The catalogue she draws on live is therefore small and heavily worked: three albums, roughly three dozen songs, most of which audiences can sing back. Songs such as Hardline, Favor, Relative Fiction and Sprained Ankle have been in rotation long enough to function as fixed points in a set that otherwise keeps changing.

boygenius, and the three Grammys

Baker formed boygenius with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus in 2018, initially for a self-titled EP that the three made in a few days and which was received as something more substantial than a side project. The trio's debut album, The Record, arrived in March 2023 and became the commercial high point of all three careers.

At the 2024 Grammy Awards the group won three prizes, including Best Alternative Music Album. The Record remains boygenius's only full-length album; nothing further from the trio has been announced.

The practical consequence for Baker's solo work was a long interruption. The boygenius cycle consumed most of 2023 and much of the touring year that followed, and the songs she has started playing in 2026 are the first substantial batch of her own material written on the other side of it.

A country record with Torres, and the tour that stopped in May 2025

The detour before the return was a country album. Baker and Mackenzie Scott, who records as Torres, had first shared a stage at Lincoln Hall in Chicago in 2016; in 2019 Scott texted Baker suggesting they make a country record together, and Baker agreed. The project was announced in January 2025 after the pair had already begun airing the songs live, with the first single, Sugar in the Tank, out in December 2024.

Send a Prayer My Way was released on 18 April 2025 through Matador: twelve songs, just under forty minutes, written jointly, produced by Baker and Scott with Sarah Tudzin engineering. Four further singles — Sylvia, Tuesday, Dirt and Bottom of a Bottle — preceded it. It reached number one on the UK Country Albums chart and number eight in Scotland, and number 34 on Billboard's Independent Albums chart. Reviews were broadly favourable, with critics noting that two artists raised Southern Baptist had engaged with honky-tonk conventions rather than borrowing their surfaces; the slow-building Tape Runs Out drew particular praise.

The tour behind it did not finish. The duo opened on 23 April 2025 in Richmond with dates scheduled through 13 September, played a sold-out show at Tipitina's in New Orleans on 1 May, and then cancelled everything. A joint statement posted on 4 May 2025 said Baker was prioritising her well-being and taking time to focus on her health, pointed ticket holders to their original points of purchase for refunds, and said nothing more. Two shows had already been pulled in March that year after a band member sustained a concussion. Baker then disappeared from public performance for well over a year.

September 2026: four songs nobody had heard

The return was arranged with no run-up. On 9 September 2026 Baker played The Blue Room at Third Man Records in Nashville, a show announced at short notice that sold out immediately. The set ran sixteen songs. It opened with an unreleased track called Lathe, which began in ambient texture before breaking into a full-band passage of vocals, drums and bass, and it carried three further new songs listed on the printed set only as F, G and O, their titles withheld. Reviewers in the room described the new material as post-hardcore-inflected and noticeably rawer and heavier than anything on her albums, and a long way from the pedal steel of the Torres record. Kate Teague opened. Baker introduced her as an artist who could not be described by comparison to anyone else. The encore was Everybody Does.

The following day she announced the tour, writing that she, Calvin and Matt had been working on new music and wanted to play it. The collaborators are drummer Matt Gilliam and Calvin Lauber, both long-standing. No album has been announced: no title, no release date, no label statement beyond the Matador relationship. What exists publicly is a handful of live debuts and a tour.

Where she stands, October 2026

The autumn run is eighteen shows in six venues between 15 October and 21 November 2026, three consecutive nights in each city: Kilby Court in Salt Lake City on 15–17 October, The Middle East in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 21–23 October, Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, North Carolina on 28–30 October, the 40 Watt in Athens, Georgia on 5–7 November, the Bottleneck in Lawrence, Kansas on 12–14 November, and Neumos in Seattle on 19–21 November. It is her first solo tour announcement since 2024, and the Salt Lake City nights were the first of it to be played.

The ticketing was deliberately awkward. Tickets went on sale at 10am local time on 12 September 2026 and were sold only in person, at each venue's box office, two per buyer — no online allocation at all, in rooms that hold a few hundred people between them. A portion of the proceeds goes to The Ally Coalition and its work with LGBTQ young people. The combination of three-night residencies, club capacities and counter-only sales reads as a decision about who gets into the room rather than a marketing device, and it has kept the shows out of the resale market that would normally absorb them.

The open question is the record. Baker has now played at least five unreleased songs in public, several of them still going by letters, and the shape of the new material suggests a louder album than Little Oblivions. Until something is announced, the residencies are the only place the songs exist.