| Stockholm-based artist waterbaby has signed to Sub Pop worldwide and is sharing her first single “Airforce blue,” and its charming, firework-laden video, which introduces her hypnotic and evocative approach to music. “Airforce blue,” is available today worldwide on all DSPs. “Airforce blue” is a swirling autotuned hymnal that distills the dizzying multitudes and nuances of crushing on someone. The song was created by waterbaby, Marcus White, and Anton Fernandez in Stockholm, Sweden. The video, also directed by her main collaborator White, underpins this unknowable evocative feeling, placing waterbaby amidst the backdrop of New Year’s Eve fireworks in Stockholm. The FADERcalls the track “An unguarded DIY R&B moment coming out of the Swedish capital (see March 29th news post).” More on waterbaby: Artists have always had a knack for understanding the strange psychological sorcery that comes with crushing on someone. waterbaby - intimately knows the tiny nuances between love – which is to say, the bond between two people – and the one-sided, up-and-down feelings of infatuation: the plaintive longing, the shifty wanting and the not-wanting, and all the luxuriously intrusive thoughts that come with them. If you’re at all familiar with the patterns of this (il)logic, you’ll find a welcome home in the world of waterbaby’s rhapsodic, technopastoral crush songs. waterbaby’s auto-tunelets work like this: there’s the confessional of sisterly, guitar-assisted warmth infused with humane, sticky lyrics that surface in your head like bubbles floating to the top of an aquarium. waterbaby, along with executive producer and collaborator Marcus White, creates a mystic sort of blend – the songs feel spell-like, but they honor the feelings of what it’s like to love, or at least to want to feel loved. The chief love in waterbaby’s life has always been music, of course. It’s infused in her blood: her great-grandad was a jazz pianist; her uncle worked in clubs and arranged concerts, and that Stockholmian syndrome of preternaturally knowing how to craft the perfect song – it’s a part of her that’s palpable in everything she writes or touches. It could be because she’s got a choir-school upbringing that’s done something to her voice – made it familiar with Pythagorean melodies and spare, delicate ideas that sound simple at first but really get into the spiritual in their own way. “My parents hated my music,” she laughs, talking about her private love of the megastars of R&B that she’d sainted as paragons of sounds and feelings that accessed the full range of emotions she was getting familiar with. Those emotions range from sad to empathetic, from hopeful to cocky, from doleful to ecstatic. “Airforce blue,” her first single, with tones as liquidly bright as a fish whipping through the ocean, gives form to the feel of the latter sort of pain. “I still miss you” goes the chorus over and over again, if that’s any help. Crushes and longing seem to map her life over with meaning and joy. |
| waterbaby “Airforce blue” |
