Dust and Devotion: Julien Baker & TORRES Haunt The National on April 23

Written by Ali DeLambo

Photo courtesy of DORK

On a rain-drenched Richmond night, The National dimmed its chandeliers and gave itself over to something wilder, heavier, and almost sacred. Julien Baker and TORRES—two artists who know how to excavate grief, devotion, and survival until they gleam—brought their double-headliner tour to Virginia’s capital like a pair of traveling preachers, offering distortion as gospel and tenderness as salvation.

The stage may have opened stripped bare, all shadow and hum, but what followed was anything but minimal. Baker and Torres stood side by side beneath moody lighting—Torres in navy blue, Baker in a bright orange jacket she quickly shrugged off in the heat—visually echoing the vibrant interplay of their voices. From the first tremor of "Bottom of a Bottle," TORRES (Mackenzie Scott) took the room by the throat—half stormcloud, half confessor, hurling guitar riffs like lightning bolts across a stunned, grateful crowd. “Sugar In The Tank” snarled and shimmered; “Off The Wagon” cracked open old wounds with a wicked grin. When she arrived at “The Only Marble I’ve Got Left,” it felt less like a song and more like a sacred object unearthed from somewhere deep in the body's oldest hurts.

Meanwhile, Julien Baker, solemn and luminous as ever, emerged with the kind of quiet gravity that makes you forget how to breathe. Her set didn’t just break you open—it rethreaded your guts and stitched something even more fragile back together. “Downhill Both Ways” felt like a prayer uttered half in desperation, half in awe. “No Desert Flower” trembled in the low light, surviving even as it withered. And when she launched into “Farewell Transmission,” the stage seemed to dissolve altogether; it was just Baker and a wave of mournful sound, roaring and collapsing like the ocean swallowing itself.

But it was the encore that shattered whatever defenses were left. When Baker and Scott returned side by side—grinning like they had just pulled off some great cosmic prank—they launched into a straight-faced, joyful cover of Tim McGraw’s “Something Like That.” Two queer women singing a slice of straight-down-the-middle country radio with full-throated abandon, reclaiming it with humor and light, cracked the whole room wide open. Laughter lifted into the rafters. Arms raised without hesitation. A collective, giddy exhale. It wasn’t just irony; it was defiance dressed up in joy, a reminder that even those who traffic in sorrow know how to dance with it, too.

This wasn’t a concert; it was a kind of baptism. A ritual of loud grief, stubborn hope, brutal honesty. TORRES and Baker didn’t just play songs at The National—they conjured something alive and messy and holy. When we spilled out into the soaked Richmond streets afterward, we weren’t just spectators. We were witnesses to something that burned and sanctified all at once.