boygenius’ Julien Baker Is Teasing Her First Solo Record in Five Years

Julien Baker has been writing about God in public since she was 19. Prayer, doubt, addiction, grace and self-loathing — usually inside the same verse — and never once packaged as inspirational. She also hasn’t made a record on her own in five years. That looks like it’s about to change. This week Baker started leaving clues where people would find them. She made a brand-new Instagram account, separate from the one she already has. It follows exactly three people. One is her. The other two are Calvin Lauber, who engineered her last record, and Matt Gilliam, who has played drums with her since they were kids in Memphis and was in her old band Forrister. Gilliam is the interesting one. On 2021’s Little Oblivions, Baker played nearly everything herself — bass, drums, keys, banjo, mandolin. There are two videos on the account. Both show her walking into a practice space. Both cut off before she plays a note. The newest post announces a last-minute set at the Blue Room inside Jack White’s Third Man Records in Nashville, with Kate Teague. Five years is a long gap, though she hasn’t been idle. boygenius — Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus — released The Record in 2023, won three Grammys, played Saturday Night Live, and went on hiatus after a secret acoustic show in 2024. Last April she and TORRES put out Send a Prayer My Way, a country album with both their names on it, then cut the tour short that May so Baker could focus on her health. She’s turned up on other people’s records since — Bridgers’ Lost Weekend, Turnstile’s covers collection. Last month she played a farm in Nantucket. In August she walked out during Dacus’ Outside Lands set to sing “Bullseye.” Baker grew up in a Christian family in Memphis, left the Church, went back, and has been circling questions ever since. “I never set out to be someone to speak about faith intentionally,” she told Denver’s Westword in 2016, when she was 20 with one record out. “I believe you can tell what is important to a person by what they talk about, and all my mental faculties are going to those questions about God. This is my experience, problems, concerns, how I feel — I’m never imposing a belief upon a listener.” In the same conversation she named her reference points, and they’ll be familiar to anyone who spent their twenties in RELEVANT’s orbit: “I never wanted to make K-LOVE type music, but there are some artists that kind of toe the line, like Me Without You and Sufjan Stevens.” She’s since said plainly which parts she kept. “I don’t doubt God,” she told the New Statesman in 2021. “I am, in fact, certain that there’s something out there, even if it’s just God manifested in the dignity of other human beings.”