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.
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 (dates are listed in full below*).
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.
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. Watch it HERE
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.
