“These are songs of survival,” Hanif Abdurraqib writes in his essay for “Little Oblivions.” This album is born out of falling apart and sitting at the rock bottom wondering if there’s more space to fall. Julien Baker derives the title for her third studio album from “trying to construct little artificial temporary escapes from our own reality because reality is extremely painful.”
Oblivions are the harmful things and ways of being we latch onto to avoid the pain we simply cannot face. Though harmful, these oblivions become how we try to make sense of the hurt that feels overwhelming and confusing. In what tears our spirit, we fill the gaps with numbing coping mechanisms that slowly chip away at our sense of self and impair us from showing up for others, or even ourselves.
Most times, “Little Oblivions” is simply described as an album about addiction and relapse. But to leave the description there is to do the album a great injustice. Yes, “Little Oblivions” is about addiction and relapse, specifically the period of Baker’s own relapse into drugs and alcohol after years of being sober; the album documents that time period. Relapse is the setting of the album, the backdrop for which the album’s events occur, but it isn’t the only theme or issue addressed.
In actuality, Baker may not be aiming to depict anything specifically, but more so capturing the problem she was grappling with, the fallout of relapse and impact of addiction being just two of many things that arise from the scenes in the songs. Addiction itself operates in multiplicities on “Little Oblivions,” showing up in drugs and alcohol, the pain of cyclical rumination, self-destructive habits and toxic interpersonal relationships.
What shapes and drives the creation of “Little Oblivions” is the disorientation that comes from finding a crack in your worldview. This discovery that whatever that informs the way you relate to the world and guides your being is false opens the floodgates: a rush of overwhelm that overtakes you before you can perceive it. The inability to comprehend this loss and the pain that flows from it are the inciting incidents of “Little Oblivions.” For Baker, this happened after demystifying God which impacted “every corner of her life.” In “Heatwave,” she metaphorically depicts herself crawling on a gravel (a metaphor for a Bible verse) to show how she accepted the pains of life for the promise that it would lead to something good in God’s eyes. But she sings, “Covered in scars, a canyon deep / it’s not like what I thought it’d be,” before shifting into the song’s outro narrative how the realization has now led to “a long spiral.” In “Heatwave,” not reaching the good of a lifetime of accepting the difficulties that come with following Christianity, is one of the cracks that shifts her perspective on religion.
The core of “Little Oblivions” lies in a lost sense of self in a life-altering breakpoint. What Baker finds herself left with are flailing images of herself and the weight of this seems to knock her back. Everything she deemed absolute – her goodness, her sobriety also becomes skewed in the face of an absent religious system to rely on.
The album’s fourth track “Relative Fiction” is a song of double meaning; the relative fictions are religion and Baker herself. It serves to show how self and religion are being deconstructed simultaneously. As Baker calls Christianity “a character of someone’s invention” and “relative fiction anyway,” she is also applying this to herself. It leaves her stuck grappling with who to become “stay callous or tender,” she wonders on “Relative Fiction.”
What’s left are Baker’s remnants: anchorless, lost and wandering a new reality, gripping to bruising relationships, engaging in reckless behavior, wallowing in despair without a sense of how to move forward and knowing she’s helpless to her spiraling. In this aftermath, vices – predictable and numbing–become the destabilizing foundation to lean upon. Baker illustrates this by putting “Crying Wolf” right after “Relative Fiction” in the album’s track list. “Crying Wolf” depicts an episode of relapse, which comes after the song that follows Baker deconstructing her worldview and herself.
Vices are the little oblivions. They make things look a little hazier without having to face reality. Baker sings on “Faith Healer,” “Ooh, I miss it high / how it dulled the terror and the beauty / and now I see everything in startling intensity.” Baker’s vices blunt the realization that religion may be a “snake oil deal,” which she goes into on the same song. However, there’s an exchange Baker admits to. It’s so crucial to lessen the pain of losing the foundation of her life, that she’s willing to trade in the other meaningful things of her life for access to her vices. She confesses, “Oh, what I wouldn’t give / if it would take away the sting a minute / everything I love, I trade it in / to feel it rush into my chest.”
“Little Oblivions” starts with Baker “blacked out on a weekday.” We are immediately thrown into the wreck with Baker, not sugarcoating what she’s experiencing. The lyrics are preceded by a distorted organ that sounds sharp, nearly screeching, evoking a visceral flinching sensation. The combination of the distorted organ and the opening lyric signal that something has gone wrong. The opening song brings about a dissonance that is harsh and difficult to hear, which is the state of Baker’s narrative.
In “Hardline,” the opening track, Baker narrates to her listener what has become of her life, constructing the song as a near monologue directed at the listener and to Baker herself. In this introduction we learn more things that will be expanded upon in the album’s other songs: pushing away her friends and failing them (“Faith Healer,” “Relative Fiction” and “Song in E”), getting into a bar fight (“Bloodshot”), being stuck in self-destructive cycles (“Crying Wolf” and “Repeat”) and asking for forgiveness without remorse for what she did (“Relative Fiction” and “Song in E”).
Though “Hardline” feels abrasive at times, it captures Baker in the thick of it, functioning as a prologue of the inciting incidents, fallout of her actions and her internal struggles. Even in these moments, we receive such enlightening introspection during the lowest moments. Blacked out and knocked (“Hardline”) she sings “draw a hardline / when I cross it, it’s the third time.” Acknowledging how her attempts to stop her downward spiral are futile and that in making promises to herself, she is already moving towards breaking these freshly established boundaries.
In the days after getting into a bar fight (“Bloodshot”) she declares that it “isn’t like I do this on purpose / I just forget the second I learned it / looking for little oblivions” and that “There is no glory in love / only the gore of our hearts.” Baker wants to convey that she’s not trying to be as hurtful as she comes across, it’s just her process of succumbing to her vice means an inability to understand how she’s hurting others and herself in the process. In “Crying Wolf,” Baker admits to herself that she’s the one looking for her vices rather than her vices finding her. The introspection of this album is eye-opening because it seems to contradict the actions Baker is describing. However, the deep introspection delivered with straining vocals display a sense of desperation and insight into the willful and powerless engagement to her vices.
Who are we when we actually hold a mirror to ourselves? Not the mirror that complements our highlights, but the mirror that magnifies the flaws we’ve convinced ourselves aren’t there. Baker provides a strong investigation into herself that is honest. She doesn’t aim to fit a narrative of the reformed artist. Baker isn’t selling you her ugly sides to show you how much she’s changed. “Little Oblivions” is Baker trying to make sense of what weighed on her during the time period that influenced “Little Oblivions.”
I don’t say it lightly when I call “Little Oblivions” one of the greatest albums of the 21st century. Baker manages to find the pulse of human nature that we don’t want to see in ourselves. The parts of ourselves that we perform not as a mask but because we truly believe ourselves to be who we tell people we are, becoming a means of fulfilling our own self-righteousness, something Baker can relate to. This is an album whose lyrics constantly come back to me, always etched into the back of my mind directing me.
This album offers no hope, no future or no consolation, just limping through the decaying frames of our lives. “Little Oblivions” ends on “Ziptie,” a mournful cry out to God. It ends unresolved, the only thing known is that Baker walks away.
“Little Oblivions” always leaves me in constant reflection and even now there are still things I’m still learning from the album, yet never fully concluding, the same way the album ends. At times listening to “Little Oblivions” feels like deciding for what you want to take with you, as Baker says she must do on “Repeat.”
There’s so much more I want to say about this album and there are many more takeaways that go beyond this essay. “Little Oblivions” has implications beyond itself, something that can seep into the crevices of our being if we let it. It’s a willingness to deconstruct yourself and accept that what you’ve called yourself may be untrue. If there is a spiral in this recognition, it may leave you closer to the essential truths of who you can become.
Somehow the rough textures of “Little Oblivions” can mold a sense of possibility and potentiality, leaving us with a tool “through which a person might better be able to see a use for their own grief.” The grief is the step into a new sense of living.
Suzanne Bagia can be reached at [email protected].
