Julien Baker & TORRES

Julien Baker (born Julien Rose Baker on September 29, 1995) is an American musician and guitarist from Memphis, Tennessee. She is a member of the alternative rock band Forrister, formerly known as The Star Killers. She released a studio album, Sprained Ankle, on 6131 Records in 2015.

For years, Baker and a group of close friends performed as Forrister, but when college took her four hours away, her need to continue creating found an outlet through solo work. The intent was never to make these songs her main focus, yet the process proved to be startlingly cathartic. As each song came into shape, it became more apparent that Baker had genuinely deep, surprisingly dark stories to tell. Tales of her experiences are staggering, and when set to her haunting guitar playing, the results are gut wrenching and heartfelt, relatable yet very personal. There’s something wonderfully hypnotizing about Baker gently confessing her soul with such tremendous honesty.

At the prompting of a friend, Baker ventured to Richmond, Virginia to record a number of her new songs at Spacebomb Studios. The tracks from this session were circulated among Baker’s friends, meeting high praise and lots of encouragement for the songs to see a proper release. Soon, she found a home on 6131 Records’ increasingly diverse roster, and plans were made to release her debut full length, Sprained Ankle.

To call Sprained Ankle a happy accident would be misleading as to the nature of these poignant, emotive songs. Yet no one, least of all Baker, could have predicted she’d be releasing an album, especially as a solo artist. Thankfully, now the world is able to share in her passion and sorrow.

Torres is the stage name of Mackenzie Scott (born January 23, 1991), an independent American singer, songwriter, musician and artist.

The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter waits until anything—an idea, an emotion, a memory—gnaws at her, tearing at her fingers and throat until she releases it in song. Scott escaped the confines of her churning mind in order to find herself by recording Sprinter in the market town of Bridport in Dorset, England; and then at the Bristol studio of Portishead’s Adrian Utley. With his guitar riffs and synthesizers lingering in the background like a lowland mist and PJ Harvey’s Robert Ellis and Ian Olliver on rhythm—the two fortuitously reuniting 23 years after the release of Dry, and in Scott’s 23rd year of living—she crafted a “space cowboy” record. “That’s as simply as I can say it,” says Scott, who cites inspirations as diverse as Funkadelic and Nirvana, Ray Bradbury and Joan Didion.

“I wanted something that very clearly stemmed from my Southern conservative roots but that sounded futuristic and space-y at the same time.” It seems like an odd thing to look for in the picturesque seaside green, rolling hills in the south of England, but Scott had never been there before, and as a stranger in a strange land she found what she was looking for: a lost childhood. Sprinter was recorded in a room that had formerly been used as a children’s nursery, which combined with the alien landscape fuels the self-searching that roils TORRES’ music.

Following her self-titled debut in 2013, TORRES pushes herself to even noisier extremes on Sprinter, a punishing self-examination of epic spiritual and musical proportions.