Messed!Up
Three years ago Danish three-piece Baby In Vain released their debut album “More Nothing” that has drawn accolades from both fans and critics and opened the door to the international scene. Soon the band had brought their melodic take on stoner-grunge to all corners of Europe and North America, including a special art performance show at Denmark’s legendary festival, the Roskilde Festival, and they played support slots for bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Kills.
In October 2020 they returned with their sophomore record “See Through”, and just a few weeks ahead of the release we met up with Lola and Bene before their show at the Reeperbahn Festival (yes, there was a corona-safe festival at Reeperbahn this year!) and had a chat about their new sound and their experiences from The Real Raw performance tour in Denmark.
Ten Years in the Scene
You have been in the scene for ten years now. Is it time to celebrate?
Bene: Yeah, on the fifth of October (laugh).
Lola: You kind of start thinking about how much time of our lives we’ve spent being in a band, and all the hard times we’ve been going through together.
Bene: We’re older now but still young if you consider that we started when we were sixteen.
Lola: But we’re a different band today and have changed quite much, especially the sound has evolved. It’s a departure from heavy rock on the new record.
I remember a great festival performance at Roskilde Festival last year with Corpus. How did it come about that you started to work with them and their The Real Raw performance? For any band that would be far outside the comfort zone because it’s so much more than music.
Lola: It was a collaboration between Roskilde Festival and The Royal Danish Theatre, and we were asked to write music and perform with this dance group.
Bene: It was a bit nerve-racking at the beginning, and we almost turned it down, but we talked about it in the band and thought “Maybe this is the next step for us, to try something new and different when we have been doing this so many years”. Just to get the chance to be creative and play music for a full three months was amazing instead of having to work part-time or study. Trying it out was a great experience for the band and for us personally.
Lola: Being part of a performance like that was kind of intense (laugh). We didn’t need to act or dance or something like that, but as a drummer and I’m used to be hiding in the back and now I suddenly ended up in the spotlight in a totally different way than I was used to. But you also have to face a challenge like that to evolve as a person and as a band. It was good for us to try it out.
But did it raise more attention for the band in Denmark?
Lola: Both yes and no. We did ten shows and it was a very specific type of audience. It felt like the project tried to attract our kind of audience and bring them into the theatre world, to get young people to come out for the shows at venues they usually didn’t go to. Of course our fans turned up but not as many as would have come out for a club show. It was mostly people that usually watch theater plays that were at the shows. At Roskilde Festival it was different because it was a festival audience.
But it was an experience. I hadn’t been to the theatre since I was a child when I watched a Christmas play; it’s not really a place we usually visit.
Would you do something similar in the future again if you were asked? Now when you know how to handle such a huge project I mean.
Lola: Yeah, it definitely lowered a few barriers to work with such projects in the future. I won’t have a problem doing something similar, but I want to do it in a different way now when I have experienced it once.
A Matured Band
Their debut album “More Nothing” was praised for its spiraling twisting aural nail gun attack of songs that fuses sneering punk vocals and dynamic grunge fuzz, a record that’s unapologetically seeped in ‘90s grunge, shoegaze and dream pop nostalgia. Or simply: it was a loud, heavy-hitting explosion.
However, Bene, Lola and Andrea have grown older and have found new inspiration for their sophomore album “See Through”, and the band display a newfound maturity in their craft.
In November you release your second album “See Through”, and when you listen to your two latest singles “Everything” and “Wherever I Go” it’s not that loud and noisy anymore. What direction are you taking the band music-wise on the next album?
Lola: We’ve always just played the music that feels right for us at the moment we’re writing it.
Bene: We may not listen to the same kind of music anymore, it’s quite different from being sixteen (laugh), and you get inspiration from other types of music today. Our interest in music has changed because we’ve grown a bit older.
But I also think that what we write today is more personal, and although I’m not writing the lyrics you can hear it’s different, like a more mature version of the band.
Lola: When we started it was more about the energy in the music, but our interests turned in another direction. There’s kind of a different type of vibe on the new record. It’s still some loud songs on there but most songs on the record are quite different than on our debut.
Will it be the definite departure from the old Baby in Vain and that type of noisy music you have on your debut record?
Lola: A bit but not completely. I think we still have a lot of The Jesus and Mary Chain in us, they also combined really loud and noisy songs with calmer pop songs. We’re not far from that and still keep some of the noisy stuff in our music, but compared to “More Nothing” the new record may sound a bit more poppy.
But how is it to release a new record in times like these when it’s not possible to do full tours to promote the record? Quite many bands postpone their releases for that reason today.
Bene: We have been working on this record for a very long time.
Lola: And we have already moved the release day once. It’s a good time to release it now even if Denmark is back in some sort of lockdown, but wouldn’t it be great if people could spend some time in quarantine listening to our new record (laugh).
We also want to get out and play more live even if it’s not really possible. We played one show a week ago and now it’s this one tonight, but it’s not enough for us.
But it’s not necessary to tour that much anymore, I used to want to play all the time but have changed a bit on that. Of course it would be great to do a big tour again but I won’t die if it won’t happen.
And is the plan to do your own headliner tour with this album, when it’s possible to tour again? Or is it still better to find support slots?
Bene: Hopefully it’s time for us to be a headliner (laughs), that’s what we want.
Lola: We’re aiming for playing shows in Scandinavia after the record is released if it’s possible and then return to Germany in the spring.
Photographer: ©Julia Schwendner
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