Malibu

Over a decade before I sit down with Barbara Braccini, in early 2013, her native France is turning a reality-TV confessional into a national in-joke. Nabilla Benattia is looking into the lens on NRJ12’s Big Brother-style show Les Anges de la télé-réalité, and begins a stream of consciousness about two fellow contestants’ lack of toiletries: “Hello? No, but hello, what? You’re a girl and you don’t have shampoo? It’s like me telling you: you’re a girl, and you don’t have hair.” The clip goes viral. There are endless parodies of Nabilla ‘on the phone’ with the likes of Bruce Willis, Claude François, and as was routinely the case, Adolf Hitler, each earning views in the tens of millions. Companies got in on the act, too, including Ikea, which advertises its ‘Hâllö’ cushion range with the line “Hello? You’re a chair, and you don’t have a cushion?”. It’s hard to imagine such an anodyne quip landing as hard today, amid our modern day slurry of absurdist-era content and split-screen attention farms. But Nabilla and the show’s production team even patents the line, such is its cultural cachet.

Her ubiquity quickly met the media’s sneer, however. TV bookings turned into set-ups for ridicule and tabloids parroted ‘bimbo’, tutting at Nabilla’s perceived vacuity, as was commonplace for many reality stars in this late-gossip blog, still paparazzi-fuelled era. Interviewing Nabilla for its then-prestigious Back-page interview slot, French daily newspaper Libération crystallised this growing sentiment in a now fabled headline: “L’Empire du Vide,” or “The Empire of Emptiness.”

On her debut album, Vanities, out October 3rd, Malibu titles track five after this very phrase. The headline stuck in her mind for its literal sound as much as its near-ridiculous grandeur, especially given the context Libération deployed it in. “I always loved that expression,” she says, wistfully. “Even back then, I was like, ah, it’s sounds so beautiful… and it’s so dumb at the same time. It’s really French lore. French people will know if they’re my age.” 

Across the 2010s, the phrase moved from media pages to become everyday shorthand for a wider mood of fame-without-substance, product-placement personae and the churn of algorithmic spectacle. “You could say it's the original term for ‘brain rot’,” Malibu explains. “It described that emptiness to reality TV, what was a new culture at that time. Maybe it was partly a fear of the unknown. But now it’s a common expression in France, more often as ‘culture du vide’, but fifteen years ago, that was ‘l’empire du vide’.” That reworking means “culture of emptiness” and has reached the level of everyday usage that it pops up in policy rows today, as a catch-all for attention-driven emptiness.

On Vanities, the title L’Empire du Vide neatly frames a track that is decidedly bare. Malibu offers drawn-out hums that brush up against one another, bouncing almost as a call-and-response with the six-note piano line that acts as the song’s pendulum. The vocals have enough intonation that they could be substituted with words, but none arrive, only offering changes in melody and dynamics. You could describe them as a slower, reverb-soaked version of the TikToker Morgan Jay’s autotuned scats, though I’d argue more hypnotic (depending on your screen-time). There’s a light crackle to the whole thing, shrouding L’Empire du Vide in what feels like a hazy, morning mist, with the only clue of where you are being a faint car alarm that plays twice before the track fades out. “The piano is quite dry,” Malibu says of the song. “It’s very stripped back overall. A bit too serious in some way. It’s not pop which might make sense with the story, but it does fit the phrase, I think.” 

To create L’Empire du Vide, or in fact any track on Vanities, she isn’t precious about process. “I don’t have a method,” she says plainly. “I don’t even know how to think ‘I want to make something in this way’, and then achieve it. I can’t do it technically. Maybe I could and that’s just me self-sabotaging. But in some way, I like to be surprised by what would come next.” Instead, as might be useful advice in many instances, Malibu often reaches for emotion. The album’s lead single, Spicy City, is a place where this emotional intensity was keenly felt, with near-instant results. “I was really angry that day, I’m not sure why,” she says. “But I came home, and I was standing up in my kitchen with the computer, and I just played everything out so quickly. I made everything in like five minutes, truly, and just polished it after.”

For a long time, she felt such deeply felt emotion was the main avenue of her creativity. But as we age, experience can change a person. For most of Vanities' production period, Barbara had a more serene sensibility. “I feel more ‘normal’ these days,” she says, laughing. “I'm not in my twenties anymore, where everything feels so intense, and you put yourself in bad situations. The heartaches feel different. I’m in some kind of peace, you could say. I'm worrying about other things, you know, but not so much the things of the heart.”

“It used to be almost scary, when you felt fine, in a weird way,” she continues. “Because you think, maybe, you’re now useless creatively. And that’s the cliché of the ‘artist’ of course; to be sad, to be miserable. But not so much for this record.” Instead, only two tracks of the thirteen on the album, Spicy City and Jaded, were made of a “heavy heart,” she says: “For the rest, it just happened. Jamming in the studio, finding things out. More like when I first started making music. When you’re very curious, you don’t know much, and you’re also more limited. You’re eighteen, you’ve just bought a keyboard, and you only have that. You jam all night, and you have this life in you. That’s the feeling.”

Relating these ideas of youthful naivety and self-limiting to DJ and musician JASSS, https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/jasss-1 who took a similar approach on her latest record, Eager Buyers, I ask if it’s difficult to mentally reach into these states, as someone who is almost a decade into their career. “It’s definitely different,” she ponders. “I wasn’t consciously trying to be naive or finding this curiosity for music again. That was not the intention, but that's still what happened, which was quite nice.” In practice, moves towards limitation were partly by happenstance, as the studio where she most frequently worked had an UDO Super 6 synth she fell in love with. It encouraged a curious, playful mindset based around that alone. “I would spend hours recording just signals,” she says. “I was playing and then re-listening because, you know, I was in that kind of mood. When I would re-listen, I would think ‘oh, this is quite nice, but it lasts five seconds. Why didn’t I do it longer?’ So then I would take this,” she says, gesturing. “And go from there, which is how I made Lactonic Crush or So Sweet and Willing, for example.”

You can have your perfect gear ready-to-go, and set aside a spare day to get your creative project moving. But, as any budding or even flourishing creative is likely to tell you, you still need to lock in, which isn’t always as simple as it sounds. “To be using a synth for, say, an hour,” she says, pausing. “It can be intimidating. It's almost a bit meditative, but it requires you to be in a sort of self-contained bubble. With everything going on in the world, whether it's politically, economically, or socially, it feels very selfish, very egotistical, to lock yourself in the studio at all.” 

Malibu began working on Vanities in 2023, soon after her most recent EP, Palaces of Pity. That spring, Sudan plunged into a deadly civil war; by autumn, Israel’s long-running ethnical cleansing of Palestine was returning to its genocidal roots. The UN’s Global Humanitarian Overview put the 2024 caseload at roughly three hundred million people in need, with near-record levels driven by conflict and climate shocks, including in the Congo. Across Europe, including Malibu’s native France, politics have largely lurched rightward, with nationalist and identity-led rhetoric replacing the open optimism of previous decades. Taken together with a seemingly unrelenting slide towards unaffordable living for the many and broken trust in institutions to solve the problems of the 21st century, and the moment certainly feels heavy, to say the absolute least.

“It feels completely out of touch to cut myself off from the world like that,” Barbara continues. “It felt like I should go out and touch grass. Do something. It’s not like I’m working for somebody, I’m working for me, within myself. It’s all me, me, me. And then not having a broken heart on top of that, it felt like I have even less validity to be doing this activity that’s very within myself.” Malibu explains this as a part of her Vanities. All the little things you cling to so a day doesn’t dissolve into nothing, whether it's a song you finish, or simply following a routine to steady yourself. “Maybe it’s an item, like a receipt ticket from grocery shopping, that means something,” she posits. 

In the face of genocide, famine and war, many of these things pale in comparison. Even if you are contributing, in some way, to help solve these critical issues, say as a volunteer, through donations or something else entirely, it’s easy to feel helpless against the power of nation states and multinational conglomerates that often do the bidding on the other side. And so, we continue to be, because what else is there to do: “The record is somehow about this apathy state, which I think a lot of people can relate to,” she concludes. “It’s like, ‘what are we doing? What does have meaning to do, to work on, when this is my skill set?’ And then, on the other hand, if I’m not working, I still feel some kind of uselessness about everything and just end up on my phone scrolling TikTok or wherever.”

“A lot of us are estranged from each other, too,” she adds. “Our shared community is lacking. This is nothing new, I’m not inventing the wheel. But that’s the state of our society, at least here, in Western society. And that's not me looking at people and doing this analysis of what they are feeling, either. I’m people.” From that vantage point, Malibu’s album title becomes clearer than it might look at first glance, and it arrived before the music entirely. “I hadn’t even started working on the album musically when I already knew that I wanted it to be the name,” she says. “Not specifically Vanities in English. I wanted it to be in French originally, as Vanités, but I was thinking, talking with friends, and we thought Vanities sounds better, and at least more international, than in French.”

She tells me a story about how the Vanities stuck for good: “I was in my car and I found an old CD of Charlotte Gainsbourg that I had when I was a teenager. And I put it on, I hadn’t played it since I was thirteen or so. And then one track really struck me, even though I didn’t remember it. For some reason, I’m not certain, but I felt that it was the best track ever. This is how I dream of a song. I wish I could have made this. But I didn’t know what it was.” She only had a black CD with no sleeve, and ergo, no track list. “I Shazam it and then, it turns out it’s called Vanities. So I was like, ok, this must be a sign that I should definitely call my record Vanities. For the anecdote, I have to.”

As you might be able to tell, there’s no strict for formulae for how album or track names come about in the Malibu sonic universe. But like with L’Empire du Vide, it was always important Vanities had the correct ring to it. “I just thought it was a beautiful word, and with everything that it means,” she says. “I have a list of words on my phone that I write for this purpose. Some tracks came from more obvious sources though, like Spicy City, which is after this HBO series I was watching. It’s very sexy, sultry, and a bit tragic. Maybe that works with the song, too. But other names arrived at the very last minute.”

Spicy City is the first track off the album, and the only one at the time of writing, to be given the music video treatment. The concept for it came from Igor Pjörrt, who had been living with a demo of the track for months. “He’s one of my best friends,” she says warmly. “He has been involved since day one, with a private link to the playlist, seeing how it was going. And ever since Spicy City went into that playlist about a year ago, he told me ‘I have a vision: I would love to shoot in a plane’.”

A visual artist by trade, he and Barbara both have an attraction to what he calls “timeless luxuries,” like beaches and sunsets, and the glossy sheen of a frost-grey aeroplane can live in that worldview. Pjörrt’s initial spark of inspiration came from another video. “He showed me an art piece as a reference called Moving Stories by Nicolas Provost,” Barbara explains. “It’s an insane video, one of the best I’ve seen. The association is more obvious once you’ve seen both.” His other references are detail-oriented and relate to the inside of the plane, understood from being up in the air himself, according to Barbara: “He was telling me about being on the plane once, a little bored, and noticing the fabric of the headrests. All the little fibres and dust particles floating around, with the air-con on. He thought it was pretty and took a photo of that. Together, these things started the idea.”

Her memory of making the track is the opposite of what the video looks like, given the heat she felt on the day of making it. “Technically, it does not match my vision,” she says. “Because I remember where I was and my emotional state. For me, it was very nocturnal, very dark. The video is very dreamy. It is supposed to suggest a crash, like I am the sole passenger. There is no pilot. It fills with air, it is a bit suffocating. There is a shadow of a man walking down the aisle that you barely see and never see again. So there are slight suggestions of distress, but in a very aesthetic and bright way.”

As with creating her music, there’s no grand plan upfront. Instead, things evolve and what comes out can be a surprising result for the better, even if it clashes in theory: “I like that it is not what I would have envisioned from those feelings I had. It is another reading, and it still makes sense. It is always good to have outside input. I express myself through music because I feel like I cannot express myself with words, so there is a constraint. I think you feel that in the video, too. It is super controlled. Very perfect, even though that is not how I felt.” 

If you’re wondering, there’s no nod and a wink to ambient’s long-standing relationship with airports here. No Brian Eno reference. In fact, Malibu isn’t a listener of music at all (and any hint at such is a bare-faced lie) so don’t pass her the aux. “I don’t listen to music, period,” she says with a wry smile. “I’m not the kind of person to wake up and play music. I don’t have Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music. I have nothing, I've never had anything and I never even think about it, I forget it exists.” Everyone listens to music when travelling, though, right? On long flights, Barbara says she has to live with whatever is downloaded. Then, held hostage by her own storage, it often becomes an obsession. “I must have listened to that MK Gee record a million times,” she admits. “I’m about to go on this long flight to Australia, and it’s the only thing I have on there. I know it by heart, but it’s not even that I like the whole thing end-to-end, you know. It's my only choice. Obsessions aren’t always good or bad, they just are.”

When she does go digging for new tracks, often for her hugely popular United in Flames mix series, there are two broad moods she categorises songs into: “I only have two playlists on my YouTube account: one called dance and one called ambient. Whatever song has to fit into that.” When listening for pleasure, Barbara searches for length, though partly for convenience’s sake. “Often I type ‘full album’ on YouTube because of the ads,” she says. “That’s the only way. I just don’t know what to play whenever I need something. Sometimes I put on my radio show for the same purpose: it’s one hour with no ads. I don’t have to look for something, it’s ready for whatever I’m doing in this time.”

That preference for length lines up with how she suggests listening to Vanities for the first time: just sit down, get comfy, and let it run. “You need to be in the mood to listen properly to this type of music,” Barbara says. “And by listening properly, I almost mean when you don’t listen any more. That’s when you allow yourself to zone out completely. You have to, or else you’re going to get tired. At least for me, everyone is different. So that’s what I want. I don’t want you to listen. I want you to get to that in-between state and feel it.”