The first book in English that can be identified definitively as written by a woman is the mystic text “Revelations of Divine Love,” by the fourteenth-century anchorite Julian of Norwich. Everything about Julian was unusual, particularly her intense awareness of failure and frailty: she was a child when the plague came to England, and the sixteen religious visions she chronicles in her book were triggered by a near-fatal illness that struck her at age thirty. Her pursuit of the truth of God is solitary and blazing, gorgeously rigorous, as if she was generating and synthesizing personal theology to light her way through an awful dark. Sin is “behovely” to her, and to God—necessary, expedient. “The soul is highest, noblest and worthiest when it is lowest, humblest and gentlest,” she writes. To read her is to observe a young woman flaying herself open in a startling act of devotion. Julian’s writing is physical—at one point, she likens the body of Christ to mother’s milk—emotional, and cerebral at once.

I thought of Julian of Norwich while listening to “Turn Out the Lights,” the new album from a musician who almost shares her name: Julien Baker, a twenty-two-year-old singer-songwriter from Memphis. Baker is a Christian whose faith has been shaped by trial and revelation: she is gay, and went through addiction and recovery before she was out of her teens. She is theologically minded and obsessively self-interrogating; on the phone last week, we spent ten minutes talking about Calvinist doctrine, which depends on the presumption of the total depravity of man.

Baker came up through the post-punk and hardcore scenes, going to house shows and later playing D.I.Y. venues with her high-school band, Forrister. She recorded most of her début album, “Sprained Ankle,” in three days, in 2014, while she was a student at Middle Tennessee State University. She put the songs on Bandcamp. They were humble and forthright, just guitar and vocals with close, sweet, overdubbed harmonies. With lyrics about black veins, bruises, and a “saline communion” in the back of an ambulance, the songs sound like questions about damnation answered in the mode of grace. In 2015, the indie label 6131 picked up “Sprained Ankle,” mastered it, and rereleased it. The album drew critical attention and a word-of-mouth following. Baker’s new fans often felt like they’d come in contact with something unusually precious, perhaps by accident. Baker’s music is so abrupt in its intimacy that it can give you the sensation, as Rachel Syme put it in a piece for this Web site, of being “an interloper, eavesdropping on someone else’s prayers.”

“Turn Out the Lights,” which Baker recorded and self-produced at Memphis’s Ardent Studios, is fuller and more deliberate than “Sprained Ankle.” If that album suggested the timber structure of a lonely chapel, this one has solid walls, and a single stained-glass window. The sound inside is richer—there’s piano, organ, strings. Baker has retained her unvarnished emo directness about matters of despair and longing: “Even you couldn’t manage to pull the fuse from the back of my head,” she sings, on “Shadow Boxing.” Her unusual instinct for modulation is even clearer than on the first album: when she intensifies a melody or a lyric or an idea, she compensates by making the other elements weightless. She measures out the devastation of each song slowly, like a person giving directions to someone wearing a blindfold; she can make small ideas feel oceanic, and shockingly raw thoughts seem almost low-key. Most of the time, Baker’s voice sounds like linen—even-textured, comfortable, carefully frayed—and then, suddenly, as on the new album’s title track, she escalates into a five-alarm wail. These moments are earned: “Turn Out the Lights,” along with several other songs on the album, builds quietly, saving the payoff for a single, purgative refrain at the end.

Baker is tiny—five feet tall, a hundred and five pounds, she told me, while recounting stories from her college job in live-music production, which required her to scale lighting rigs, haul heavy equipment, and take long Epsom-salt baths afterward. Speaking between tour stops, she was voluble and effervescent in a way that also felt scrupulous: she wakes up “super early” every morning, she said, “so that I can be alone and run the defrag on my mind.” She was inquisitive and imaginative and doubtful as a kid, and then, later, after her parents separated, angry and self-destructive. “I was distrustful, in an annoying way, of the culture of traditional religion and the power structures that imposed themselves on me,” she said. “I was trying to use Saussurean linguistic arguments to get out of detention. It ended up being that all of that did not afford me any refuge. It had to be resolved through negotiation.” She got sober and came out to her parents, churchgoing Christians who surrounded her with love.

Baker’s thoughts, like her music, adjust constantly between poles of permission and self-recrimination. (“It’s not that I think I’m good / I know I’m evil / I guess I was trying to even it out,” she sings on the penultimate track of “Turn Out the Lights.”) At one point, after referring to God with a male pronoun, she stopped herself. “I have a learned habit of gendering God, but I don’t actually believe God has a gender,” she explained. We talked about how a religious childhood imbues you with an unshakable concern with right and wrong, “the idea of an imperative question that you have to ask yourself constantly.” Mine, I told her, was spent inside a Texas megachurch—an environment that taught me to take pleasure in devotion but whose corporate politics made it relatively easy for me to drop my faith. Baker’s voice tightened slightly. “I’m getting less willing to censor myself on this subject,” she said. “And maybe it’s true that every different type of church meets people where they are. But that sort of packaging of the church into whatever a consumerist society needs . . . it’s scriptural—it’s in Acts, Matthew, John—that if anyone has a surplus, then no one should have too little. If you have wealth, you give it away.”

Baker has honed these ethics within both her religion and her music—two spheres that, for her, almost completely overlap. It’s become anathema to her to see anything valuable hoarded or obscured. This is part of the reason that her lyrics are still so stark: she was tempted, she said, to make certain lines less straightforward—“more complex, more pretty, more vague.” But those thoughts, she figured, would turn treacherous if she hid them. She remains captivated by the possibilities, within live music, of legitimizing and actualizing mutual dependence.

When she was twelve, she made her dad take her to see Underoath, a post-hardcore band that, like her, circles Christian ideas without courting a specifically Christian fan base. “It revolutionized my world to watch someone imploring the audience in that way,” Baker said. (She has a stick-and-poke tattoo of the band’s logo.) It was soon after this that she got into the local punk scene. “A house show feels like a true faith community, socialist and communal,” she said. “The lead singer is less than two feet away from thirty people who are screaming the same thing. Punk teaches the same inversion of power as the Gospel—you learn that the coolest thing about having a microphone is turning it away from your own mouth.”

These days, Baker has been guarding herself against the sense of uselessness that lately seems a near-universal side effect of reading the news. “The territory of futility makes me feel fear,” she said. “And conviction. How could I be so callous that I allow myself to feel defeated?” She’s been going to an Episcopal church that is led by a woman pastor, who recently told her, plainly, “I don’t believe God made man to be pieces of shit.” The statement changed her. Baker is no longer as convinced of her brokenness as her music might lead you to guess. For a long time she believed that she was born depraved, and had to learn how to be good. Now she’s wondering what it would be like to believe—really believe—that she was born beautiful, that everyone was, and we’ve been beaten down by a society that teaches selfishness, and what we have to do is try to unlearn it, note by note.