Baby Man, the new album by Fruit Bats, is like nothing else in songwriter Eric D. Johnson’s catalogue. 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. Monahan’s return to the booth was vital: having mapped the outer limits of Eric’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.”