Julien Baker & TORRES Blend Indie Sensibilities with Country Sounds
They’re not the first indie darlings to seek new frontiers in country music, but Julien Baker & TORRES might be the most deliberate about it. With Send a Prayer My Way, the duo enters country’s open pastures not as tourists in borrowed boots but as artists genuinely grappling with what country does that indie can’t. Baker & TORRES, both architects of raw, emotionally intricate songwriting, have thrown themselves into country’s most demanding elements: plainspoken storytelling, unmediated vocals, melodic ease, and the gravitational pull of place.
It helps, of course, that neither of them arrived without baggage. Baker & TORRES, Southern by birth (Tennessee and Georgia, respectively), have histories of gravitating toward, resisting, and reinventing the music of their roots. Baker, the delicate existentialist of the boygenius trio, has long draped her narratives in reverb, distortion, and liturgical hush, speaking in tongues of doubt and devotion. TORRES, sharper-edged and more confrontational, has spent the last decade alternating between wry detachment and primal yearning, veering from folk-rock to art-punk to synth-driven grandeur.
That these two would find common ground in country—a genre built on tension, contradiction, and longing—feels not just logical, but overdue.
What Indie Can’t Do
If the indie and alternative worlds have given Baker & TORRES license to experiment, subvert, and luxuriate in ambiguity, country gives them something more radical: the permission to be direct. Indie music, particularly the strain that raised them both, often prides itself on poetic distance, on sly evasion and elliptical truths. The best country songs, by contrast, cut straight through. There is no room for mystery when a steel guitar wails its own version of grief; no space for detachment when a story is laid out in three chords and the gospel truth.
Baker’s hallmark is the patient dissection of pain, an emotional generosity that has built an audience less adoring than familial. But confession can sink into its own echo, buried in sonic mist and literary remove. Country forces Baker’s hand; in a country song, say it plainly or don’t say it at all. For TORRES, who has long played with the theatrics of power and persona, country is a risk of a different sort. Her sharpness as a lyricist has often come from tension—between her voice and her arrangements, between sincerity and subversion.
The result is an album that neither artist could have written alone, and one that neither could have written without stepping outside the constraints of indie’s cultivated cool.
Tradition as Cage and Canvas
Country’s genre-bound obligations could swamp a lesser duo, as indeed it has other pretenders to the category. The expectation set is so known, it can trigger a kind of comedy, as Orville Peck embraces in his playful country camp. Or it can prompt a feeling ofw cynical commercialism: Post Malone singing about trucks feels about as authentic as our sitting President reading the Bible. But Baker & TORRES are up to something else, wrestling with country’s tropes on their own terms, inhabiting them with both reverence and self-awareness. No token dobros here.
Consider the album’s title: Send a Prayer My Way. As country a shorthand as “bless their heart,” a throwaway plea uttered over truck stop coffee or between two phone lines full of static. But in Baker & TORRES’s hands, it’s not just a gesture of faith—it’s a question of who, exactly, is on the receiving end of that prayer. Country music has always been tangled up in faith and doubt, sin and salvation, and both Baker and TORRES have spent years orbiting those themes. Here, they lean into country’s mythic weight, but without the cheap certainty that adheres to the genre’s most vapid writers.
Take their single “Silvia,” a short, pensive missive that showcases the astonishing way the duo elevates one of country’s favorite ballad categories: the Leaving Song. Country music thrives on motion, on the tension between running away and coming home. Baker, who has long treated her music as a kind of nomadic reckoning, knows the weight of this trope well. TORRES, too, has always been a traveler in sound and geography. The question they pose here isn’t simply where they’re going, but what it means to move at all—emotionally, sonically, spiritually—and what is left behind when the road won’t stop calling.
The Sound of a Reckoning
And then, of course, there is the music itself. We can’t talk about Send a Prayer My Way without considering how its sound both challenges and reshapes its two creators. Baker’s voice—so often stretched to its breaking point in her indie work—is given more room to breathe in country’s softer, earthier arrangements. The absence of indie’s cavernous reverb forces a new kind of clarity, a new kind of presence.
TORRES, always a master of texture and contrast, reins in the bombast of her more theatrical instincts, leaning instead into the slow burn of twang and melody. The result is a new kind of urgency—not one built on volume or distortion, but on restraint. Something is thrilling about hearing two artists known for pushing against boundaries instead commit to country’s discipline—not in submission, but in curiosity.
With Send a Prayer My Way, Baker & TORRES haven’t just dabbled in country—they’ve made it their own. What could have felt like a one-off novelty project, a hipster’s detour into honky-tonk aesthetics, instead feels like the product of deep engagement with the sound of country, with its history, its contradictions, its emotional possibilities.
The real success of this album isn’t that Baker & TORRES have entered country, but that they have expanded it, and brought to it a perspective that feels at once authentic and transformative. Don’t let the line-dancing distract. They are here to reckon with what country music has always done best: tell the truth—with pedal steel and slide guitar.
