Specific Description:
Translucent blue vinyl pressed ghostly effect in a matte jacket and an inner sleeve printed with lyrics.  limited edition.

Baby Man, the new album by Fruit Bats, is like nothing else in Grammy-nominated songwriter Eric D. Johnson’s catalog. Little in the arc of his career—including Fruit Bats’ evolution from home recording project to rollicking roadshow, his solo output, and his work with Bonny Light Horseman—points the way to this album, in which his only accompaniment, aside from the occasional blush of synthesizer, is a guitar, banjo, or piano. Save for producer Thom Monahan, reuniting with Johnson for the first time since Fruit Bats’ 2019 breakthrough Gold Past Life, it’s just Johnson in the room, meaning that when the turntable’s needle meets Baby Man’s groove, it’s just him and the listener, mutually in for a reckoning.
Working with Monahan in the past pushed Johnson to new sonic vistas, evidenced by a songbook of sprawling, ornately detailed crowd-pleasers. When Johnson produced Fruit Bats’ 2023 album A River Running to Your Heart, Monahan served as a sounding board, and their reunion started in a similar vein, with Johnson asking to borrow a microphone or two for a project that was just starting to take shape. One conversation led to another, and Baby Man came into being: an ambitious take on the sketchbook album where everything—lyrics and music—had to be newly written and recorded from scratch, everything he’d been cooking to that point left at the door. Every morning began with an empty page, every night concluded with a new song, sometimes two or three new songs, each of them terrifyingly beautiful.

Monahan’s return to the booth was vital: having mapped the outer limits of Eric D. Johnson’s musical imagination, nobody was better equipped for the deepest trip yet into his soul. Baby Man is an intimate album, but rather than deliver a stripped-down or back-to-basics approach to the Fruit Bats sound, its introspection is rendered at epic scale. “It’s minimalist-maximalism,” Johnson says of his and Monahan’s approach. “There are fewer tracks on each song—four or five at most compared to recent albums where there’d maybe be five tracks on a song just for synths—but this is me at my most hi-fi.”

Release Date:  September 12th, 2025 
Record Label: Merge Records
Format + Color: Translucent Blue 12" Vinyl LP

Tracklist:
Let You People Down
Two Thousand Four
Stuck In My Head Again
Baby Man
Creature From the Wild
Puddle Jumper
First Girl I Loved
Moon’s Too Bright
Building A Cathedral
Year of the Crow

Cover Art: Photography by Chantal Anderson, design by Daniel Murphy

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