The songs on Julien Baker’s debut album Sprained Ankle were so silvery and quiet they could easily be mistaken for demos. Scraped-raw and shaky, they suggested an intimacy so intense that even listening in headphones felt like eavesdropping. So it’s remarkable just how assured and open “Turn Out the Lights,” the title-track from her upcoming album, sounds and feels.

Even though the sound starts in familiar territory, with a murmuring tangle of guitar notes and her low, bruised singing, the mood is wry and forthright: “There’s a hole in the drywall/Still not fixed/I just haven’t gotten around to it/And besides, I’m starting to get used to the gaps,” she observes, like someone who’s made peace with their surroundings. The chorus hinges on one lyric—“There’s no one left between myself and me”—that could read as a wail of despair, or a powerful statement of ownership. The first time she sings it, over clean-strummed guitars, it feels like the former. But the song builds to something truly astonishing—Baker throws her head back and howls, hitting the distortion pedal on her guitar and letting every coiled and tensed emotion that normally lurks in her songs explode free into the sky.