#fresh Baby Queen new song Dover Beach just washed up to shore
Photo by Clark Franklyn
“Deadpan and hilarious...a perfectly harmonized power-pop chorus mocking all her misery... She sees both sides, and she knows pop is on the side of optimistic escape, even if she’s not.”
Alt-pop’s new anti-hero Baby Queen releases her new single “Dover Beach” today on Island Records / slowplay, and it was featured on BBC Radio 1’s Hottest Record. The track follows “These Drugs” and her highly-praised single “Raw Thoughts” which was picked up in the U.S. by NPR, Billboard, Coup De Main Magazine, and more. Listen to “Dover Beach” HERE + watch the video HERE.
Her latest “Dover Beach” - a widescreen smash with flecks of The 1975 and optimistic dream-pop like M83 - chronicles the time in October 2020 when she headed to a place she had long dreamt of visiting. Bella says, "In school I was obsessed with this poem called 'Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold and I always wanted to visit the Dover cliffs, so I went there alone on a writing trip in October last year. I actually wrote the melody and lyrics of this song while I was sitting on the beach. It's about being infatuated with somebody and seeing them everywhere you look. I was kind of pissed that I went to look at the beach, all I could think about was this person, hence the lyric "you stole the view of Dover Beach." It's another internal struggle with my own insecurities and a sort of acceptance of the fact that I can't escape my daydreams of this person, even if I go to a different place."
The 23-year-old South Africa-born, London-based artist (real name Bella Latham) arrived in the alt-pop sphere barely a year ago but has already carved her name deep into its fabric with her crooked sceptre. Since her first release “Internet Religion” last summer she has dropped a steady slew of singles that place her at the forefront of a musical movement.
Last year she dropped her debut EP Medicine which paired alt-pop sensibilities with scathing, stark social commentary. This new era of Baby Queen’s story is more inward looking. “That was the introduction to the essay, where I said all my points and beliefs,” she says of the tracks that make up Medicine. “Now I have the freedom to write love songs without someone thinking I’m vapid and shallow!”
Behind Baby Queen’s opening, socio-critical musical moment lay a bruising, exhilarating backstory. Now that we know how she feels about the world, she’s ready to tell us how she feels about herself. “I feel like my instinct is to take something disturbing and painful and make it sound really fucking beautiful and happy,” she says. The song’s she’s writing with that mantra will make her a proudly rare jewel in contemporary pop’s crown.
