BABii

I feel pretty good. I actually can't feel what it feels like yet because I've just been doing too many things. So, I can't really comprehend what's happening.

It was really slow, and then it was really fast. I started it and I had this idea of the Dante's Inferno with all the different circles of hell, and it was a really nice little format to make an album. It made it kind of easy because it had all these limitations. But then my dad passed away and I got really bad writer's block. Then I went to the studio with Warpstr in LA because I was playing a show there and he broke my writer's block. It was so good and just really helped me figure it out. But I also got given this opportunity to use this studio where they do residencies in my hometown and I was like, oh, I could do a writing camp there because it just expanded and had all these extra rooms and stuff. So, I set a date at this studio, and I invited all of my producers that I wanted to work with to the studio. Then it all kind of happened in the space of a week, pretty much. I had like 40% of the album done before we went to the studio and then some of the songs were just made entirely in the studio, which is kind of crazy.

It has nothing to do with the Marvel character. But I guess it kind of aligns with it in a weird sort of way by accident. I am into like video games and like anything with narrative. I don't play a lot of games but I'm one of those people that kind of watches YouTube videos about games rather than actually playing them cause I don't usually have time. So, it does have a lot of influences from narrative, not just in particular video games like movies, especially. I feel like when I make albums, I'm just trying to make a movie. Cause I like movies and things like that more than I like music, which is kind of crazy. I kind of came at it from the perspective of a movie rather than making an album.

There’s quite a lot. Scooby-Doo and the Batman and Robin, the worst Batman film, but it's my favourite one. There’s like a bunch of like funny little niche influences, just anything with some kind of monstrous characters. There’s a vibe. Lots of very campy types and robot wars. There's also this documentary about this ice hockey team called DB Trashers, which was quite an influence too.

Every time someone asked me this question when I was younger, I would always say teleportation. I think I still would say that one because that would be really useful as a musician. It'd be so easy to tour, it's very practical. Although I do like being on transport and travelling so I don't really know (laughs).

I've got quite a lot of them. I've had quite a colourful upbringing, that’s a nice way of putting it. So, I've I feel like I've come to the other side of a lot of my demons, and I've worked through a lot of things. But throughout my life there has been lots of internal demons that have affected me in different ways. Music has always helped me work through them or just making things in general. My whole family is like really crazy and it's kind of personal to me this album in a funny sort of way because I think people sometimes just demonise people and just think they're just inherently bad and there's definitely a lot of grey area. There are reasons why people do bad things, except the exception of like psychopaths and sociopaths. But people that have their own internal demons and they end up becoming monsters themselves for one reason or another. It's kind of the thing that I was exploring with the album.

I had a lot of help, which was really nice. Shout out to Gr1n for helping me so much with the exhibition and everything. It was also one of these kinds of things that happened by accident. My friends, Reality PSD, put on a show in the same space and I played the opening night, and I met the people that run the gallery. They were a fan of my music, and I was like, give me a little moment and I'll think of something to do. Then I was like, I have to do some kind of album launch and I asked them if the gallery is available around the time of my album. They said, yeah and then I thought I've got this narrative, how can I create something that's immersive with the record. It just made sense to have an evidence room because the whole narrative is kind of told through this investigation type thing. I guess it's kind of funny because it kind of seems like there'd be some kind of thing that ties all of the characters together and all these things but it's still kind of quite fragmented. I'm trying to still figure out what the end of all of this is. It's literally a mystery to me too (laughs).

That song is kind of dark, that is one of those external demons, actually. During the process of writing this album, there was a couple of circles of hell that I was really struggling with and one of them was heresy. It took me a while to figure out how to actually tie that in and I still had to really explain how that is actually heresy, except through the narrative of the character now. I actually had a stalker. He was like a superfan who was a paranoid schizophrenic and this wasn’t actually that long ago. It was quite scary and really hard to deal with, because I also really empathised with the person that was on the other side of it. He was sending me a hundred messages a day and voice notes and sending me scary videos. It was the most complicated thing to deal with.

I didn't. It was all going on while I was on my U.S. tour, and it was really messing my head up because the way he was speaking was all this weird, symbolic stuff. That song was me kind of trying to process this really crazy thing that happened. How it all came to an end was basically I was supposed to be in a show in Scotland somewhere, which is close to where this person was located. I was getting more and more worried that they were going to show up to the show and I was having to warn the promoters that I have this stalker, and they need to watch out. Just as I was traveling up to the show, I got a phone call from the police, I reported him to the police because I was so worried that something crazy was going to happen. They told me that he'd been sectioned and that he was really unwell, but he was still managing to send me messages because he still had his phone. I told the police, and they said, oh, we'll get his phone taken away from him. Before they took his phone away, I messaged him with quite a heartfelt message. I was genuinely worried about him and I kind of understand that everything that was going on was really out of his control. I don't know where he's at now, but I hope he's all right. Hopefully he got help in the hospital he was in.

I'm just like an accidental boss in the studio, I think. I'm not scared about telling people what I think, which really helps. Everyone understands that I'm trying to help them by giving them my opinion and people seem to respect what I have to say, which I'm quite fortunate for. I don't know how that's happened, but I think it's just because it does come from a place of love, more than me just being mean or anything. Before we went to the studio as well, I made this big PDF document with everything, all the influences visually, as well as sonically, and really described what I wanted the album to sound like. But I didn't try and control things too much because it was really interesting letting people interpret this vision that I had in the ways that they also saw it.
Things like the Backrooms song, for instance, that kind of turned into a song that I never would have imagined being on this record but I'm really glad that it exists. I think it gives it a lot more dynamic because originally, I was just thinking it was going to be this really relentless, very beat heavy, kind of noisy, scary record. But there's definitely a lot of moments of calmness in it too, which I was really happy about.

Just being open to feedback is really important because if they're just like, no, I'm going to do it how I want to do it, then that's never really going to work out. It's just all about collaboration and compromise between two people. It's more of a dialogue rather than me being like, I would like a beat that sounds like this, please. Also just not being scared to experiment, that's also why in the studio. I tried to create this environment where everyone felt comfortable. The experimentation is important.

I’ve actually been thinking about this. I was thinking it'd be really funny to do a remix album, but just use all the same producers and do a pass-to-pass because that's kind of what we're doing in the studio anyways. I kind of low key already have remixes of the songs because there's different versions that were going around in the studio at the time. But if I chose an external person to remix it would be someone who was an influence. It'd be cool because I did some like weightless grime stuff, which was very much influenced by mumdance. He did this project with Novelist and stuff and made this really cool like genre that didn't exist for very long. It'd be cool to get mumdance to remix a song.

I already had the idea of all these different villains, so I wanted to reflect that. Originally, we were going to try and do all of the 12 villains on the cover, but it was really complicated so we just did the singles. It's all kind of based on a painting, a video game concept art that I really love. It’s of this very innocent looking girl and she's surrounded by all these demons. Obviously, I connect with this painting so much and I just wanted to recreate that in my own way. The adverts kind of happened by accident. I actually can't remember how the advert thing actually happened. I think it was because I was making my website, actually and then I was like, damn, I feel like you use this in the whole design. It kind of became a really big part of the whole visual concept.

I like the least popular song at the moment, which is Theft Act 1968. I looked at it today and I was like, damn, my favourite songs are the least popular ones. I get I think it's two different types of people. People that like really in your face music and then people that are more chill. But yeah, I really like this song, it just feels like a song that I never imagined I would have made as well. It kind of feels like creeping around like it does what it's supposed to. I just really enjoyed making it because I enjoyed envisioning myself as this just weird character that just trespasses and I'm just this weird shadow and nobody ever sees me but I'm in everyone's houses all the time.

I don't know. I was talking to the photographer from the project today and he was saying that he wanted to make a music video for M25 and I was like, you need some money to make a video. So maybe we'll make them other ones for fun. Who knows?

I would be a chef. That's what I used to do before and literally I went to music school and then I took a year out and I got a job in a kitchen. Just pot washing. But I kept working my way up in the kitchen and I ended up being a sous-chef. I was like, wait, hold on, this is all I want to do in my life. I would have just continued working in kitchens because I absolutely loved it.

Oh, there's always new genres I want to dip my toes into. I love mixing things together. I think I kind of want to explore different styles of singing maybe and maybe make something more chill. I have a really good solid plan about what I'm going to do next. But it's quite hard to explain. All the songs kind of sound like they're mixed terribly. I'm going for bad mixing next. I guess I was influenced by certain genres for Daredeviil2000. There are grime influences but I also quite like to maybe even make some more baseline again. That really worked for me, and I really love playing those songs. No one's really jumped in the bandwagon in the same way yet so I feel like I can make my mark a little bit on that one.

I know exactly what it is. The New Sound, the Geordie Greep record. I fucking love it. It's the frontman from Black Midi. It's a solo project and I really like it because he's playing a character the whole time. I love The New Sound. I've listened to it so many times already. I think it's my album of the year.

I haven't, I've got a lot of things I need to finish. But no real solid release plans yet. I’ll just be playing a lot of shows, and I need to make some visual stuff. It's like a search party kind of theme so everyone's kind of got torches in the audience and then the CCTV of the monsters, like on the visuals. I'm going to be playing in the audience the whole time, every time.