Malibu – Vanities
Today, Malibu announces her debut album Vanities out October 3 via YEAR0001.
In addition to the announce, Malibu shares her second single “So Sweet & Willing” off the record.
“So Sweet & Willing” follows her first single “Spicy City”.
Malibu has quickly become a recognized name in contemporary ambient music. This year she supported Oklou on tour and her United in Flames NTS show has grown into a listener favorite, featuring guests like ML Buch, Evian Christ, and Julianna Barwick. Her previous work includes a track on the influential PAN’s Mono No Aware compilation, her 2024 Essential Mixtape EP on YEAR0001 with Merely, Palaces of Pity which DAZED included in their “20 Best Albums of the Year”, the score for the 2024 film La Fille Qui Explose, and much more. With upcoming festival appearances and tour dates now on sale, Malibu is continuing to build a strong presence in the ambient music scene.
Malibu’s debut album Vanities was almost titled Vanités. In French, the term alludes indirectly to self-absorption through the art historical tradition of vanitas paintings, where staged objects serve as reminders to look beyond the here and now, beyond the you and me. In Malibu’s signature sound of embedded imagery—imaginary landscapes or allegorical arrangements—a life- or-death undertone begins to emerge.
The album stages a contemporary version of the vanity complex. It deals not just with the paradox of self-surveillance and self-relativisation, but with a self that seeks romantic refuge or to romanticise the lack of one. Sonically, Malibu worked with what was immediately present, favouring a less digital process, centered around keyboard studio improvisations. Concentrated or restless, the songs are shorter, more scattered, and looser in form. Vocally, she stays closer to the surface—less distorted, more irregular than before.
Whether tempted or tempting, expressing desire for desire’s sake or longing for longing itself, the theme of vanity ultimately slumbers as a knowing admission.
Written mostly over two years in Stockholm—nu means “now” in Swedish (as well as “naked” in French)—, Vanities is also a meditation on cities. In particular their panoramas: cities experienced from the outside, cities seen from above. Stockholm here becomes a substitute for the parallel loneliness and broken promises of L.A., where the album was finished.
Nightmares, the music seems to say, are no less dreams. Unrealities, no less real.
Malibu quote on Vanities:
The sea brought small treasures back to the shore that The Girl scours every day. She finds little things buried in the wet sand, she fills her pockets with them and walks back home. She lays the little treasures around the house.
She wanders around, from one room to the other ; one is dark and cold. The AC works but the light doesn’t when she flicks the switch. The sun that hits the electric blinds hardly penetrates the room, the light dances on the walls, predictable yet never the same.The Girl likes the corridor, it is narrow and she likes the sound of her heels on the hardwood floor. Between two doors, a painting, too small, loosely framed ; waves are distinguishable, and in the horizon the glow of the birth of a sun, or its death. Whatever.
When the night comes she roams around the city in her Chevrolet, the cream leather seats are warm and she gets dizzy in the winding roads. She stops and looks over the valley slowly lighting up in the dusk, —a silent watcher.
I am one of those that are invisible, with a window down maybe, part of this undefined symphony of cars that come and go. Teenagers roll-by, fast, loud, —and we all look at the same sky, the same planes landing and taking-off, the same lights blinking on the tops of downtown, the same corridors of taillights, the same trees that block the view. We sit and fantasize a thousand lives, in the blaring sweetness of the night that’s come.
She sighs and goes home. She will come back the next day, and the next one.
#malib9