Julien Baker has established herself as one of indie rock’s most emotionally fearless songwriters, crafting intimate anthems that transform personal pain into universal connection. The 20 best songs of Julien Baker showcase an artist unafraid to excavate her deepest vulnerabilities while delivering them through masterful arrangements that range from sparse acoustic confessions to thunderous electric catharsis. Whether experiencing her work through her solo discography or her contributions to the supergroup boygenius, listeners encounter music that demands full attention—preferably on headphones where every nuanced production choice reveals itself.
Baker’s catalog spans multiple critically acclaimed albums including Sprained Ankle (2015), Turn Out the Lights (2017), Little Oblivions (2021), and her collaborative work with boygenius on their self-titled EP (2018) and The Record (2023). Her evolution as a songwriter reflects a willingness to expand her sonic palette while maintaining the raw emotional honesty that first captivated audiences.
Not Strong Enough
The breakout single from boygenius’ The Record represents Baker alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus at their most explosive and self-aware. This track builds from a deceptively gentle opening into a stadium-sized chorus that acknowledges personal weakness while celebrating the power of showing up anyway. The three-part harmonies create a wall of sound that feels simultaneously vulnerable and defiant, with production by boygenius and Catherine Marks capturing the energy of three distinct voices finding strength in unity. The song’s commercial success on alternative radio introduced Baker’s artistry to audiences who might have missed her earlier, quieter work.
Appointments
From Turn Out the Lights, this track showcases Baker’s ability to find profound meaning in mundane moments. The song examines the struggle of maintaining daily routines while wrestling with depression, transforming a simple narrative about keeping appointments into a meditation on survival and self-care. Baker’s guitar work here demonstrates restraint and purpose, with each note serving the emotional architecture of the piece. The sparse production allows her voice to carry the full weight of lyrics that many listeners have described as almost uncomfortably relatable, making it essential listening for understanding her approach to mental health themes.
Song in E
Opening Little Oblivions with distorted guitar and a driving rhythm section, this track announced Baker’s willingness to embrace fuller rock arrangements. The song maintains her lyrical vulnerability while delivering it through a sonic framework that recalls 90s alternative rock, complete with layered vocals and dynamic shifts between verses and choruses. Producer Calvin Lauber helped Baker craft a sound that honors her acoustic roots while pushing into new territory, creating one of her most immediate and accessible songs without sacrificing emotional complexity.
Hardline
Perhaps the most guitar-heavy track in Baker’s solo catalog, this Little Oblivions standout features searing electric guitar leads that complement lyrics about setting boundaries and recognizing toxic patterns. The song’s arrangement builds methodically, adding instrumental layers that mirror the emotional escalation of someone finally choosing self-preservation over codependence. The mix balances clarity and controlled chaos, allowing every instrument room to breathe while maintaining the raw energy of the performance, making it particularly powerful through quality headphones that can handle dynamic range.
Faith Healer
This centerpiece from Little Oblivions explores addiction and the desperate search for anything that might provide relief from internal turmoil. Baker’s vocal delivery shifts between whispered confessions and full-throated declarations, supported by piano and atmospheric guitar work that creates a sense of space and isolation. The song’s literary quality—with its extended metaphor comparing various coping mechanisms to faith healing—demonstrates Baker’s growth as a lyricist capable of sustaining complex ideas across multiple verses without losing narrative thread or emotional impact.
Rejoice
The opening track from Sprained Ankle remains one of Baker’s most devastating performances, stripping everything down to voice, guitar, and reverb. Recorded when she was barely twenty, the song introduces themes that would define her work: faith, doubt, and the complicated relationship between suffering and transcendence. The minimal production on this debut album, recorded in only a few days, creates an intimacy that makes listeners feel like they’ve stumbled upon someone’s private moment of reckoning, establishing the sonic template she would later expand upon.
Emily I’m Sorry
One of boygenius’ most heart-wrenching offerings from The Record, this track features Baker taking lead vocals on a devastating apology song that examines the aftermath of a failed relationship. The production employs subtle string arrangements that enhance without overwhelming the central vocal performance, while the harmonies from Bridgers and Dacus provide emotional support that mirrors the song’s themes of friendship and forgiveness. The bridge section offers one of the album’s most memorable melodic moments, showcasing Baker’s gift for crafting hooks that serve emotional rather than commercial purposes.
Sour Breath
This Turn Out the Lights track demonstrates Baker’s ability to locate beauty within discomfort, examining self-destructive behavior with unflinching clarity. The guitar tone here is particularly noteworthy—slightly overdriven but controlled, creating warmth without sacrificing definition. The song builds through subtle dynamic shifts rather than obvious crescendos, rewarding careful listening and revealing new details with each encounter. It represents the kind of patient, mature songwriting that distinguished her sophomore album from her debut.
Me & My Dog
From the original boygenius EP, this Baker-penned contribution showcases her narrative songwriting at its most cinematic. The track tells a story of escape and loyalty, with production that positions it somewhere between folk and indie rock traditions. The interplay between the three vocalists creates textural interest throughout, while the arrangement leaves space for each instrument to contribute meaningfully to the emotional landscape, making it a highlight of their collaborative work and frequently explored in deep listening sessions.
Guthrie
Named after a friend and featuring some of Little Oblivions‘ most intricate guitar work, this song balances technical proficiency with emotional accessibility. The fingerpicking patterns create a foundation that supports lyrics examining friendship, distance, and the ways we try to maintain connection across geographic and emotional divides. The production allows Baker’s guitar to shine while adding tasteful percussion and bass that ground the composition without cluttering its essential simplicity.
We’re In Love
This boygenius track from The Record captures the euphoria and terror of new romance with equal measure. The song’s arrangement moves from intimate verses to a chorus that explodes with layered vocals and full-band instrumentation, mirroring the emotional intensity of falling in love. Baker’s contributions to the vocal arrangement demonstrate her understanding of harmony and counterpoint, creating moments where three distinct voices become something greater than their individual parts.
Cool About It
Another boygenius highlight, this track examines the performance of emotional detachment with sardonic humor and genuine pain. The production features careful attention to sonic details—note how the drums enter and exit strategically, how the guitar tones shift between sections, and how the vocal mixing allows each voice clarity within the dense arrangement. It showcases the supergroup’s ability to craft radio-friendly indie rock without compromising their artistic vision or emotional authenticity.
Even
From Turn Out the Lights, this song explores themes of worthiness and unconditional acceptance through religious imagery and personal narrative. Baker’s vocal performance here demonstrates her range, moving from barely-whispered vulnerability to powerful sustained notes that carry the song’s emotional climax. The sparse instrumentation serves the lyrics perfectly, never distracting from the central question the song poses about whether redemption is possible for those who feel fundamentally broken.
Favor
This Little Oblivions track features some of Baker’s most direct lyrical writing, examining codependency and the ways we compromise ourselves for others. The arrangement employs electric guitar with a tone that sits between clean and distorted, creating tension that matches the lyrical content. The rhythm section provides steady propulsion while allowing for dynamic variation that keeps the listener engaged across the song’s runtime.
True Blue
From The Record, this boygenius collaboration demonstrates their ability to craft immediately catchy melodies while maintaining lyrical substance. The song’s production is polished without feeling overproduced, finding the sweet spot between indie authenticity and mainstream accessibility. Baker’s contributions to the harmonies create depth and richness that rewards repeated listening, particularly when experienced through quality earbuds that preserve the stereo imaging.
Heatwave
This Little Oblivions standout features Baker at her most musically ambitious, incorporating synthesizers and programmed drums alongside traditional rock instrumentation. The song examines climate anxiety and personal catastrophe in parallel, using natural disaster as metaphor for internal collapse. The production by Calvin Lauber creates sonic layers that reveal themselves gradually, making it one of the album’s most rewarding repeat listens.
Salt in the Wound
From the boygenius EP, this track showcases the collective’s ability to blend their individual styles into something cohesive yet distinctive. The song features intricate vocal arrangements where Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus trade lead and harmony roles, creating a conversation through music. The instrumentation remains relatively simple, allowing the vocal interplay to take center stage while maintaining forward momentum through the rhythm section.
Bite the Hand
Another gem from the boygenius EP, this song demonstrates the darker edges of their collaborative sound. The lyrics examine betrayal and self-preservation with sharp imagery, supported by guitar work that alternates between gentle fingerpicking and more aggressive strumming. The production maintains clarity while allowing for a slightly raw quality that enhances the emotional immediacy of the performance.
Mental Math
Released as part of the B-Sides collection, this track offers insight into Baker’s creative process and the songs that didn’t make album cuts. Despite its non-album status, the song features fully realized arrangement and production, with Baker’s voice carrying lyrics about calculation, risk, and the impossibility of predicting outcomes in relationships. The guitar tone here is particularly beautiful—warm and slightly compressed, creating an enveloping sonic environment.
Blacktop
Closing out our list with a track from Sprained Ankle, this song represents Baker’s foundational approach: one voice, one guitar, and complete emotional transparency. The minimal production allows every breath, every string squeak, every subtle dynamic shift to contribute to the overall impact. It’s a reminder of why Baker first captured attention—her ability to create entire emotional universes with minimal tools, relying on songwriting craft and performance intensity rather than production tricks or sonic embellishment.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Julien Baker’s most popular song?
“Not Strong Enough” with boygenius has become Baker’s most commercially successful track, receiving significant airplay on alternative radio stations and streaming platforms. However, among longtime fans, songs like “Appointments” and “Rejoice” hold equally important places in her catalog, representing the intimate songwriting that first defined her artistic voice.
What genre is Julien Baker’s music?
Baker’s music exists at the intersection of indie rock, folk, and emo, evolving from primarily acoustic arrangements on Sprained Ankle to fuller rock instrumentation on Little Oblivions. Her work resists easy categorization, incorporating elements of Americana, alternative rock, and confessional singer-songwriter traditions while maintaining a distinctive sonic identity that’s immediately recognizable.
How did boygenius form?
Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus formed boygenius after touring together and recognizing their creative chemistry. They recorded their self-titled EP in 2018 during a brief break from their individual careers, creating six songs that showcased their distinct voices and collaborative potential before reuniting for the full-length The Record in 2023.
What equipment does Julien Baker use?
Baker is known for using a variety of guitars including Fender and Gibson models, often running them through effects pedals that create her signature reverb-heavy tones. On Little Oblivions, she expanded her setup to include synthesizers and drum machines, working with producer Calvin Lauber to craft fuller arrangements while maintaining the emotional directness of her earlier work.
What themes does Julien Baker explore in her music?
Baker’s songwriting consistently examines mental health, addiction, faith and doubt, LGBTQ+ identity, and the complexity of human relationships. She approaches these themes with nuance and personal specificity, transforming individual experiences into songs that resonate universally while never compromising the particular details that make her narratives compelling and authentic.