Baker has no problem appeasing the critical overlords either. Since her 2015 debut album Sprained Ankle, Julien Baker has thoroughly disarmed reviewers, forcing an unusual mass prostration. “[It] was a bolt of lightning from out of nowhere, zapped down from heaven directly into a bottle bobbing in a vast and lonely ocean…” Ben Salmon from Paste Magazine then remarked on Baker’s debut. “[It] could bring you to your knees,” Ian Cohen from Pitchfork wrote of the same. Perhaps Pitchfork’s vast sea of disdain is not as bottomless as it seems. Or perhaps Baker tricked them all by creating something no one knew how to critique.

Turn Out the Lights, released just this October, is yet another confounding display of talent. Uncut vulnerability insulates Baker from the typical blowback often reserved for sophomore albums. Baker surges with hope as quickly as she sinks with despair -- oftentimes within one song, and sometimes even in a single line. “Maybe it's all gonna turn out alright / And I know that it's not, but I have to believe that it is,” she rapidly backpedals in “Appointments”, the record’s first single.