Our Lady: Julien Baker recommends the best band you’ve never heard
It’s an undeniably great feeling when you stumble upon an act that few others have heard of and they blow you away. Your next move after falling head over heels for them might be to protect them at all costs and gatekeep them as being your own wonderful little discovery, or you might want to spread the word far and wide so that others can revel in their brilliance. No good band should have to be forced into obscurity for eternity, and that’s largely a notion all true fans of music should choose to live by.
If 6131 Records hadn’t picked up on Julien Baker and chosen to release her critically acclaimed debut album Sprained Ankle in 2015, would that mean we’d now be living in a world where boygenius had a different third member, or where they didn’t even exist at all? Would she still be self-releasing music into the void on Bandcamp and still waiting for someone to notice her worth?
It’s tough to imagine how different the course of time would have run if certain events hadn’t ever taken place, but without certain people choosing to big her up at the start of her career, who knows what the reality would be for her now.
Of course, we’re living in a timeline where numerous publications and other artists have sung the praises of Baker, and this has contributed towards her stratospheric rise in popularity in the last decade. This has put her in a position where she now has a platform of her own to lend her seal of approval to smaller acts that she believes ought to be given the same level of adulation as she has been afforded. If an artist like Julien Baker says something is good, her fans are ultimately going to pay attention to that and check out her recommendations.
In a feature for Bandcamp, Baker took time to single out Illinois post-hardcore group Our Lady as a band who she stumbled upon through the DIY circuit, and after seeing them perform at SXSW was immediately enamoured by their raucous emo tendencies and general amicable nature off-stage. “We’ve actually never played a show together,” says Baker, “but I saw them at SXSW and they’re so kind.” She’d go on to say how the two would always look out for each other when coming to play each other’s towns, before commending them saying “they were so accommodating. They didn’t write us off.”
Guitars are played at the highest volume across large amounts of II, the EP that Baker singled out, and there’s a balance between screamed vocals and emotionally weighty earnestness that endears the listener to everything they put on display across its seven songs. “They sound like a mix of middle-era Brand New and Mewithoutyou and Sunny Day Real Estate,” Baker continued, before expressing her love for their use of a cellist. “It’s so cool. I’m like, ‘Why aren’t you guys the biggest thing ever?’”
Although Our Lady are no longer operating as a group as of 2016, if Baker had kept that information about the band’s brilliance to herself, then people might not still be stumbling upon their music, and they would be a band that even fewer people will have heard of. Speaking about the idea of lending favours to other acts on the DIY circuit, Baker said to Bandcamp that “you pay it forward. When you hook someone else up with a show, the next time you come through their city, they hook you up.”
