Julien Baker (US) s Becca Mancari (US)

A twenty two years old singer and guitarist Julien Baker started making music at the university with her band at the time Forrister. She started playing solo in 2015 when she has released her debut album Sprained Ankle. It was a collection of humbly rendered folk songs, dealing with the topics of depression, substance abuse and also a crisis of faith, since Baker claims to be christian. During her short career, she already opened for bands and musicians like Death Cab For Cutie, Conor Obers or Belle & Sebastian. In 2017, she signed up with Matador Records (Cat Power, Interpol, Pavement, Yo La Tengo) and released her second album Turn Out The Lights. The album is more expansive in sound and vision but the real draw is Baker’s songwriting and lyricism. The result finds Baker narrating a deliberate meditation on how we each try to deal with our ever-shifting mental health, and the impact this can have on both ourselves and others. The album sets out to address how the process of coping with internal conflicts affects different relationships –romantic, familial, and friendly. Baker turns outward to embrace the challenges of the human experience, weaving personal struggles together into one surprisingly hopeful chorus.