Baby Queen – I Hope You Don’t Remember Me
Alt-pop pioneer Baby Queen has announced her highly anticipated second album, I Hope You Don’t Remember Me which is released on July 24th on Insanity Records.
Alongside this news comes a visualiser for new single, ‘Permanently Obsessed’, the fourth track to be unveiled from the album following previous releases ‘Word Vomit’, ‘Feel Something’ and the album’s title track ‘I Hope You Don’t Remember Me’, an antidote to the famous ballads about a fear of being forgotten.
Seeking a radical creative shift, Baby Queen (the artistic moniker of South Africa-born, London-based songwriter Bella Latham) decamped to Los Angeles to make her second album with producer Alex Casnoff. The resulting record combines live instrumentation and synths and features a powerhouse rhythm section boasting legendary bassist Michael Shuman (Queens of the Stone Age) and drummer Carla Azar (PJ Harvey, Jack White).
Driven by the fallout of a seismic, strange romance and written in a period of intense emotional turbulence, the record marks a departure from early EP Medicine, The Yearbook mixtape, and Baby Queen’s Top 5 hit debut album, Quarter Life Crisis. Shifting away from her signature sociopolitical commentary, she turns the lens inward, delivering a deeply personal record of heartbreak and self-reckoning. Bella elaborates, “This is a story about love, rejection, ego and shame told by an unreliable narrator whose understanding of love is warped.
When I began writing for this album, I was determined to be as present as possible which meant putting down any notion of the type of song I should be creating, and simply trusting that what naturally came out of me, was what was meant for me.
The songs I wrote seemed to reveal more about me than about the people or relationships I was writing about.
A spotlight was shone into corners of myself I hadn’t looked at in a long time. Truths I had long been trying to avoid became, through the experiences I was detailing and the process of writing about them, unavoidable.
The album is an emotional journey from a type of beginning to a type of end; an almost real-time description of a behavioural pattern, but in my mind (and I think on the album too), the story remains quite unresolved.”
The album news arrives alongside new single ‘Permanently Obsessed’ and an accompanying visualiser. “I have long had a habit of idealizing a lover; turning them into a mythological creature sent to mirror my redeeming features and answer my many unanswerable questions, which is really just another form of self-avoidance and self-protection,” Bella says of her new single. “This song is about a recurring pattern in my own behaviour that renders the identity of the lover redundant; something unhealed within me that yearns to recreate a particular dynamic.”
Baby Queen recently made headlines alongside rock icon Courtney Love, who was also the one to urge her to record her upcoming album in Los Angeles. Giving fans a glimpse of their relationship, the pair shared an intimate, acoustic cover of Geese’s ‘Au Pays Du Cocaine’. The video features Bella providing guitar accompaniment and joining Courtney on vocals.
Further showcasing her versatility as a lyricist, Baby Queen joined the Lost In The Foxglove poetry collective for a special collaborative event titled ‘Bruised Lips’. Held at The George Tavern in May, it featured Lauren Bulla, Emmeline Armitage, Ary Maudit and others as well as original poems performed by Baby Queen herself.
Baby Queen has also announced a 9-date run of in-store shows at record shops across the UK – ticket bundles go on sale today (Friday 26th) at 10am to fans who pre-order from UK Record stores.
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