Second chances are often bandied about like penny sweets. Disposable sentiments and flagrant avoidance techniques deployed in a rushed bid to rectify damaged connections, their gravity — the sheer commitment and emotional labour required either to forgive or to attain forgiveness — is often lost in the rush to reconciliation, leading only to further hurt down the road.  Mining the depths of her own hurt and regret as she does, singer-songwriter Julien Baker has positioned herself as something of a modern scholar on the second chance. Her close attention and jagged honesty in this field bears detailed, powerful, mature fruit on Little Oblivions, her third studio album.

Memphis-hailing Baker’s viscerally confessional lyrics and vulnerable, yet ginormous, singing voice have so far been propped up on a scaffold of minimal piano and guitar, with the lion’s share of cuts from both 2015 debut Sprained Ankle and 2017 follow-up Turn Out the Lights utilising a spare, tender sound to let the words ring clear. Baker has never been one to pussyfoot around the ugly truths of living through addiction and mental illness, and her writing is consistently unflinching as it interweaves these themes with the often-tumultuous process of navigating her queer and Christian identities alongside. There’s nowhere to hide for the listener, whose own ills can easily be transposed onto the bruised wisdom Baker espouses.

With Little Oblivions, Baker has allowed her sound to deepen and develop, exploding outwards into new textures and techniques. Working largely alone, she has created a much larger band-driven sound to match the foreboding size of her lyrical preoccupations. Jittery organ stabs transition into reverberating guitars and huge drums fit for stadiums on opener “Hardline” while sweeping instrumentals and bold musical flavours populate the edges of a number of tracks — “Bloodshot” bounds along on its guitar riffing and shimmering pop balladry, and “Repeat” is carried by bring, hopeful chord progressions and a cyclical closing refrain that fractures into digitised noise. It adds up to what is by far Baker’s busiest work so far, likely inspired by the larger, more layered approach of her work with songwriters Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus in indie-rock supergroup Boygenius, but it is by no means unfocused because of its expanded range.

In truth, this third effort may be the songwriter’s most difficult listen as well as her most engaging. Baker has a knack for blending rich imagery with blunt, direct declarations, and there’s a despair at the heart of some of the record’s standout lines that can be hard to stomach. Her intention to “start asking for forgiveness in advance” is a brutally-articulate, familiar feeling of cyclical destructiveness that opens up the album on a bleak note that will be sustained and cut with cathartic release over 45 minutes of adept alt-rock. As the listener struggles to hide under the musical bells and whistles from Baker’s unrelenting gaze — her dogmatically-instilled self-flagellation always seeks company in those who hear it — they are assaulted with pinpoint-accurate statements of familiar hopelessness and loneliness.

These hard-hitting turns — “couldn’t stand the thought of having everything to lose so I tied a knot” on “Crying Wolf” or “how long do I have until I’ve spent up everyone’s goodwill” on “Favor” — are the fulcrum at which Baker has sustained her artistic vision on this broader canvas, arriving as they do in the moments where the music drops out to leave the singer’s voice naked and open to attack before dropping into a wrenching instrumental break. This deft one-two is a signature for Baker, allowing her most impactful words to vibrate into the bones of her listener, and it manifests in its starkest form on Little Oblivions as the more expansive sound creates a much starker dynamic. Never are Baker’s words far from front-and-centre, and there is still plenty of quiet amid the new noise where they are allowed to take absolute control. Late highlight “Song in E” is a piano ballad in the classic vein, shifting along a sequences of diminished 7ths and minor chords that cushion some of the record’s most uncomfortable, but vital, revelations — “wish that I drank because of you” undercuts Baker’s commendable efforts to keep sobriety under pressure, while imploring the song’s subject to “tell me that I was you biggest mistake to my face” and “give me no sympathy / it’s the mercy I can’t take” exposes a masochistic bent brought on by heartbreak.

Light exists amid the dark, as on any of Baker’s work, as extended sessions of self-reflection uncover reasons to hope. Lines on “Relative Fiction” see her look ahead to a time when she’ll “finally be ok, just not the way I thought” and “Favor” shows gratitude for the concerned friends who “were trying to do me a favor.” Much of the album’s new sonic texturing presents opportunities for brightness, too, as on the bassy, loose groove underneath “Bloodshot,” the fidgety programming and mid-career Jimmy Eat World guitars of the aforementioned “Favor,” or the growing thrum and chugging bass of “Highlight Reel” — a penultimate cut whose lyrics arrive at a place of agency and self-repair that feels like Baker emerging from a long, dark tunnel.

Ultimately, Baker sees more than hope in forgiveness — received by and given to others, or indeed given to oneself. In the scripture-indebted imagery of closing track “Ziptie,” she moves from seeing human nature as a “curse” towards commending the capacity for a higher power to absolve. As an angelic falsetto leads the track to its final chords, Baker defines forgiveness as a sacred thing, both human and beyond human in its centrality to a life that can move forward sustainably. “Nobody deserves a second chance / but I keep giving them,” she sings on mid-album cut “Ringside,” Initially, it sounds like a surrender to the inevitability that others will hurt you, but its meaning shifts as Little Oblivions reaches its close into a statement of intent and a show of strength. Nobody deserves a second chance, but everybody needs them — so please, Baker asks, keep giving them.

Rhys Handley (@RhysHandley2113) is a cultural journalist from Doncaster, England. He now lives in South London, where he drinks copious amounts of ginger beer.