Beach Baby share second album ‘Songs From The Limbo Lounge’ + confirm UK tour

Beach Baby release second album‘Songs From The Limbo Lounge’ UK Tour announced

Praise for Beach Baby’s debut album, ‘No Mind No Money’“Captures a sense of loneliness, dreaming and desperation…they’re unstoppable” Dork ****“Spellbinding…a prosperous future ahead” DIY ****“A captivating warmth and comfort which will ultimately keep you coming back for more” Clash“One of the best new bands in Britain” Sunday Times “Their songs slouch like teenagers, but listen closely and you’ll hear this London band have an ear for melody and lyrical turn of phrase” GQ

Beach Baby’s sophomore album ‘Songs From The Limbo Lounge’ is out now. UK tour confirmed, including a show at London’s Moth Club on 10th September. Lead track ‘Way Too Meta’ – a woozy, sad-eyed anthem, featuring deliriously Beach Boys-esque backing vocals and a rhythmic piano line that Elton John would be proud of. As a wryly humorous depiction of artistic malaise, with a distinctly 60’s/70’s palette.

The song provides a perfect introduction to the topsy-turvy world of Beach Baby’s second record – the Limbo Lounge. Indeed,  ‘Way Too Meta’ finds co-vocalist Lawrence Pumfrey on fine lyrical form, articulating some of the record’s central themes – burnout, loneliness, limbo – with a characteristically self-aware wink and a shrug: ‘No one likes a writer who’s depressed who doesn’t show the proper gratitude/Coz if you’re sad then it isn’t all bad, you can sell it with the right platitude…’ But if album two has been a little while coming, that’s because after touring 2016’s acclaimed debut ‘No Mind No Money’ extensively, Beach Baby found themselves – well, with no money. So in the dark months at the start of 2017, the band repaired to the ‘summerhouse’ (read shed) at the bottom of drummer Shep Hodgson’s garden, and set about converting it into a makeshift studio, with co-vocalist Ollie Pash at the helm as engineer and producer. It was a place where the band could lick their wounds and reconnect, over the shared warmth of a portable heater. It was a place where they could take their time. The first song to emerge from this long period of hibernation –  ‘Lovin’ Feeling’ – was still characteristically melancholy, but it also featured 70’s sax and bongo flams, and it made you want to party. Possibly in a dagger-collared shirt and a pair of sunglasses. It was a breakthrough. The band turned the heater up to full to celebrate. Inspired by both the sordid world-building of Tom Waits and Lou Reed, Beach Baby had also begun to explore a place in their songwriting.

A purgatorial netherworld inhabited by down-on-their-luck weirdos – a subterranean drinking hole, lurking in the margins and the in-between – where, as title track ‘Limbo Lounge’ puts it, ‘down is up, and up is down’; where ‘no-one cares where you’ve come from, and no-one cares where you’re going to’. And whilst the band never set out to make a ‘concept’ album (the word can inspire dread in even the most adventurous music listeners) – it suddenly became clear that all the songs they were writing existed within this place. Certain common themes abounded; existential confusion and spiritual dereliction; romantic burnout; quasi-religious encounters; characters riddled with loneliness and comic delusions of grandeur. The new songs weren’t just Beach Baby’s second album. They were Songs From The Limbo Lounge. And Beach Baby? They were the Limbo Lounge house band.

It was a galvanising moment of inspiration. By re-imagining themselves as the house band of this hermetically sealed alternate reality, Beach Baby finally felt able to fully reflect the music they listened to, in the music they were making. Indeed, if you listen closely to the album, you might hear elements of 70s power pop, Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters, Phil Spector-era George Harrison, every-era The Beatles, Bowie at some point or another, Glam Rock, un-Glam Rock, Piano Balladry, Country Blues, Country and Western, Lou Reed & pals, punk, funk, funk-punk, lo-fi, hi-fi…and the list goes on. But interminable genre-name-checking is beside the point. All that mattered was that what had begun as a DIY project in a shed, had suddenly become something much more expansive, much more colourful, and much more ambitious.

The result is Songs From The Limbo Lounge – a place where weepy ballads rub up alongside saxophone-infused anthems.  It’s a world built from a mad, eclectic jumble of audio-visual influences – but it also feels strangely coherent, consistent and fun to listen to. And why?Because the songs all come from that same place of Limbo.

UK Tour Dates

10th Sept || London || Moth Club11th Dec || Guildford || The Boileroom12th Dec || Ramsgate || Ramsgate Music Hall 14th Dec || Liverpoool || Sound Basement 17th Dec || Birmingham || Hare and Hounds  18th Dec || Glasgow || Broadcast 19th Dec || Edinburgh || Sneaky Petes 20th Dec || Leeds || Hyde Park Book Club

Beach Baby:Instagram | Spotify