FEATURE: Spotlight: waterbaby — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Nemo Hinders Sasaki

waterbaby

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IT is a pity…

PHOTO CREDIT: Erik Pousette

that waterbaby is not more known and present on social media. I cannot find the Swedish artist on Twitter on TikTok, so I have included the sites where she is present. It is also unfortunate that she shares her name with a Pop duo. Regardless, there has been a lot of positive press and buzz about an artist who is among the most promising rising talents. I am going to get to some interviews soon enough. First, here is some detail about a stunning musician signed to Sub Pop:

“Artists have always had a knack for understanding the strange psychological sorcery that comes with crushing on someone. Stockholm-based artist 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.

With the Foam EP, her Sub Pop debut, 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. Along with producer and collaborator Marcus White, waterbaby 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 the music I listened to,” 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 that she was getting familiar with.

On Foam, those emotions range from sad to empathetic, from hopeful to cocky, from doleful to ecstatic. “Airforce blue,” with its 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.

“911” – with the whee-oo whee-oos – moves with an even more doleful indulgence. “Call me when you need someone / I could be your 911,” she sings, like a lovelorn operator on the other end of the line.

On the glistening “Wishing well,” swirling vocal effects, and lyrics of unrequited love – “Yeah, we tried to feel it all, wanted to see it all / Wanted to be it all / So why don’t you need my love? / I-want-you-to-need-my-love” – ride waves of piano arpeggios that swell, break, and crash into themselves.

With Foam, waterbaby gets it: loneliness and love aren’t mutually exclusive ideas– they’re sometimes part of the same thrust of feeling. Believing in that idea seems to be her governing motive. Because like faith, like a crush, her music is a quick and deep way of reaching beyond yourself”.

I am going to get to a recent interview that NME published about waterbaby. Before I get there, The Face fired ten questions at an artist that everybody needs to watch out for. She is an exceptional talent that I think is going to dominate the scene soon enough. Songs like 911 show that she is hugely talented and original:

“waterbaby has had a bit of a nightmare this week. Just a few days ago, she had to have emergency dental surgery; the morning of our interview, dogs were called to her building in Stockholm to sniff out bed bugs.

“Can you believe they have dogs for that? Luckily I don’t have any bed bugs, but I haven’t been able to stop scratching my body since,” she says, shuddering over Zoom. “As for the surgery, the pain is starting to creep in, but I got to keep the teeth!”

All is well, then, not least because waterbaby is also gearing up for the release of her debut EP, Foam, a gorgeously constructed five-track project exploring the trepidation of new love. “I could be your last love and you could be my first /For you, I’d do the things that I said I’d never do for no other”, she sings on stand-out track 911, before melodically emulating an ambulance siren in the chorus: “We-ooh, we-ooh, we-ooh”.

“Foam has grown slowly but surely over a three year span,” the 25-year-old says. “I worked with [producer] Marcus White and it took us a while to find ‘it’, but I think we did. Before, I would have described myself as a very open person, but I’ve come to learn I’m not at all. Music helps me express my embarrassing feelings – love, that kind of stuff.”

Growing up in Stockholm’s suburbs, waterbaby was hugely influenced by her grandfather, a jazz pianist. When she was nine, her mum encouraged her to apply to a classical music school. waterbaby wasn’t so keen – she wanted to be in Destiny’s Child, not sing in a choir. “I really grew to love that kind of music in the end, though, because all I’d ever known was R&B, garage and neo-soul,” she continues. “Then I started writing my own stuff, which I’ve been doing ever since.”

Has she still got her eyes set on Beyoncé-level stardom? For now, waterbaby just hopes her EP elicits some kind of emotional reaction in her listeners, whatever that may be. “It doesn’t really matter how they feel – I just want them to feel something, to relate,” she says. “When someone can put words to your feelings or thoughts that you can’t quite figure out for yourself, that’s amazing.”

10% Where were you born, where were you raised and where are you now based?

I was born in… Where the fuck was I born? Somewhere in Stockholm. I was born and raised here, and I’m still here. I think I’ve lived in thirteen different places, literally on all sides of Stockholm. I’ve been around!

20% What’s a bad habit that you wish you could kick?

Oh my God. Do you want a fucking list? I’m addicted to ice, but I love it so much that I don’t want to quit. So I’m not gonna say that, even though it fucks up my teeth from crunching on it. I haven’t admitted it to myself yet, but vaping is a bad habit I wish I could kick. I can stop. I can quit.

30% What’s a piece of advice that changed your life?

My friend said the other day: “Never expect or assume that people have their shit together”. I’m such a messy girl, so I always assume that I’m the worst and that no one else is messy, that they all have their shit together. But people literally don’t and that’s fine.

40% If you were cooking food to impress someone, what would you make?

I actually made my mum a menu today for her birthday. So, I would probably make some sort of pasta, with chicken, mushroom, garlic, lemon and parsley. Or fufu, the way my dad makes it.

50% If you ruled the world for a day, what would go down?

How much can you really get done in a day? I’m really indecisive. Fucking hell, there’s just too much to fix, I don’t even know where I would begin. I’m worried that whatever I say, in some alternate universe it’ll become true and have some kind of butterfly effect that’ll fuck everything up. So I’m going to say nothing.

60% Love, like, hate?

I love my family and my younger siblings – I’m obsessed with them. I like the Swedish summer. I hate toothache.

70% Number one holiday destination?

I’ve been dreaming of the French Riviera for a really long time. I’m actually going in the summer!

80% What’s the most pointless fact you can share?

I was recently in Singapore doing back-up singing and apparently it’s illegal to sing in the streets in front of people.

90% If you could travel back in time to see an iconic music act perform, who would it be?

Maybe The Jackson 5 or just Michael Jackson.

100% What can artists do to save the world?

This goes for everyone and not just artists specifically, but I wish that people would be nicer and less judgemental. If you don’t have something nice to say, shut up. That’s all”.

I am going to finish off with that interview from NME. As I said before, I hope that she does get onto social media sites like Twitter, as there are a lot of people waiting to discover her wonderful music. There is a tonne of competition and choice out of there. I feel waterbaby is in the upper tiers and has a very long future ahead:

“When Kendra Egerbladh, AKA Swedish singer-songwriter Waterbaby, walks through her native Stockholm, she is overcome with heartache, stunned by the beauty of the city where she was born and raised. Each street transports her back to the past and suddenly, she’s 18 again and heartbroken, planning how to turn that pain into art. This misty-eyed nostalgia was the driving force behind her debut EP as Waterbaby, released this week (June 14).

The ‘Foam’ EP is burdened with feelings of intense longing yet there’s a quiet hope bubbling just below the surface. On ‘911’, each line speaks of possibility and, in a playful chorus, Egerbladh’s imitation of an emergency services’ siren becomes her catchiest hook. The record R&B, folk and alt-pop in a hazy sonic voyage through Egerbladh’s influences which range from Frank Ocean to Fleet Foxes.

In the lead up to releasing her own music, Egerbladh has garnered a following through collaborations with fellow Swedish artists, alt-popstar Seinabo Sey and folk singer Hannes, the latter of whom she released velvety folk R&B track ‘Stockholmsvy’ with, which has garnered more than 27 million streams on Spotify. Yet she has remained somewhat of an enigma, rarely giving interviews and quietly crafting her EP over a three year period. She speaks to NME on a Zoom call from her bedroom in Stockholm after recovering from an illness that forced her to cancel her first London show.

“Hope, to me, is a constant,” she says. “I would say I’m a hopeful person, but the EP was also about going back to whatever emotional space I’d been at during different times and shadowing that on the record.” A choir school education prepared the singer for a musical career where she followed in the footsteps of her mother who would sing in gospel choirs while Egerbladh was growing up.

NME: Your debut EP, Foam, depicts a hopeful yet melancholy sense of yearning. What headspace were you in when you were making it?

“Literally every single headspace because it was created over a three year period. Some of the songs are me going back to being 18-years-old and heartbroken, but at the same time, I’m very hopeful. Hope, to me, is a constant. I’d say there’s a sad hope and a longing to feel that links all the songs on the record.”

R&B is experiencing a revival right now spearheaded by artists like FLO, No Guidnce and Sam Austins. Do you feel like a part of any genre based movements?

“I feel like I have R&B in my bone marrow. I connect with that genre, but when it comes to my music, I have a really hard time putting myself in any box. I know that other people are gonna put my music in a box anyway. People have such different perceptions. Someone literally said that I make Afrobeats the other day, so I’m just trying to let the whole genre thing go and let the music sound like whatever it sounds like. I truly just want the music to speak for itself and let it land however it lands with each and every listener. It’s gonna sound the same no matter what I or someone else calls it, but I definitely grew up with R&B so I connect with it.”

Sweden is one of the largest exporters of pop music in the world with artists like Zara Larsson and COBRAH coming out of the country in recent years. How do you think the Swedish pop scene is evolving?

“I think, like with everything, the lines are very blurred right now. I think it’s going to continue to get more blurred and more mashed up. It’s interesting to see what’s happening and it’s also fun because it means that people don’t have to stick to their one thing as much. They can be a bit freer when it comes to creating stuff”.

If you have not discovered the sensational waterbaby, then make sure that you correct this. I think she has a bright and golden future ahead. I am quite new to her music, but I have spent a lot of time listening to Foam. It is a brilliant E.P. that ranks alongside the best of this year. I would urge everyone to check that out. Even those these are early days, I think that the world will be hearing a lot more music from…