
After dropping hints and following the release of their first single ‘Sugar in the Tank’, Julien Baker & TORRES have announced the release on 18th April 2025 of their debut album “Send a Prayer My Way” via Matador. The album has been in the works since the two played their first show together in 2016 and at the end one singer turned to the other and said, “You know, we should make a country album.”
“Send A Prayer My Way” is that country album, written and sung in the outlaw tradition— described as defiant, subversive, working class, and determined to wrestle not only with addiction, regret and bad decisions, but also with oppressive systems of power. The songs are about wrapping up a long shift and driving home bone tired, just hoping for a little weed and a quiet place to put your feet up; or falling off the wagon (again) and wondering if this time it will finally drag you under the wheels; or thinking that bad decisions are the only decisions you know how to make.
Elizabeth Wetmore, author of Valentine, wrote: “For some of us, maybe even most of us, it’s been a rough year. As I write these words, it’s mid-November in Chicago, the warmest autumn on record, and the bad news keeps coming. Family and animals and homes washed away in the rural south. A wildfire season that never ends. Too much water in some places, not enough in others. Back in my home state of Texas, pregnant people, some barely out of childhood, are dying for lack of medical care. And Lord have mercy if you, or someone you love, is an undocumented immigrant, or if you’re trans, queer, poor, Black, and the list goes on (and on and on). Sometimes it feels like the whole damned world has made up its mind to destroy itself once and for all. So I feel it in my bones when Julien Baker sings”
You can pre-save “Send a Prayer My Way” here.
Baker & TORRES have shared a new single, ‘Sylvia’. With its yearnful lyrics, cool harmonies, and swelling pedal steel guitar, the new track not only embodies the duo’s love of country music but highlights each of their singular approaches to songwriting and the genre.
TORRES says, “The morning I went to pick up my dog Sylvia from an upstate shelter, I was at home making my coffee and I turned on WFMU and Dolly Parton’s ‘Cracker Jack’ was on. I burst into tears—it felt like the universe was telling me she was going to be mine (Sylvia was only meant to be a foster). I remember thinking that I’d love to write a song like that, a song that people could feel in their chest within five seconds of turning on the radio, because anyone who has ever had the honour of sharing a home with a beloved pet knows that a pet is family—they’re the best friends you could ever have.”