NAME:
Baby Queen
ABOUT
A few years ago, Baby Queen hurt so bad that only writing songs could take the edge off. The South Africa-born, London-based songwriter—real name Bella Latham—had decamped to New York to try and escape things. Lying in bed late into the day, smoking her 12th joint, she felt like she was sinking into herself, wracked by disbelief at how much her life had been screwed up by one person. She hadn’t been to therapy and didn’t want to start right now. She had to write the album first.
“It was an avoidance of healing, throwing myself into creation,” she describes it as now, with a year of removal from the worst point of it, a brief period of pot abstinence, and a therapist now in her life. “Then when it was finally finished and I listened back, I was like: ‘Fuck. This person needs help.’”
Bella’s artistic name was built on biting sociopolitical stuff. Her fans have always looked to her as a musician who talked about how fucked up the world had become. On early EPs and mixtapes, like 2020’s Medicine and The Yearbook in 2021, she was skewering the internet (“Internet Religion”), obsession with body image (“Pretty Girl Lie”), and narcotics (“These Drugs”). It was crystallized on her debut album, Quarter Life Crisis—a hot streaming hit that coincided with an appearance in the Netflix behemoth Heartstopper. But this state of the nation outlook, in which she became a conduit for her generation’s feelings, also became a box of sorts. “I always felt like Baby Queen had to be speaking about those things,” she says now. “But for the longest time I hadn't been in love.”
That’s when something changed. A couple of years ago, Bella fell for someone, hard and messy, “and when you’re in love, it shines a light onto all the cobwebbed corners and the cracks. Everything that's unhealed.”
What followed was one of the most intense experiences of her life: a romance that felt seismic but strange, that ended slowly until—sensing agony around the bend—she broke away from it entirely. “I just destroyed this thing before I could even say how I felt,” she says. “I never even once said how I felt to this person.”
From it, she wrote I Hope You Don’t Remember Me, a crushingly real album about a sort-of break-up, made from the messiness of her unmedicated feelings. After years of looking out into the world and commenting on all that caught her eye, she’s made an album about the ugliness of her insides.
The material she was searching for came to her out of the blue at the end of 2024, “and it opened a floodgate,” she says. At first, while writing this music, she remembers thinking: This doesn't feel like Baby Queen. But it was pure. She told herself: “You have to put it out. You're doing a disservice to yourself if you don’t.” And so the process began.
“All I've done for the past few years is be a musician,” Bella says. She locked herself in her room, smoked weed and wrote about what was bothering her. Her minor ideas turning into major ones, splintering off in different directions until there were dozens, if not hundreds of them. “I just committed to the bit fully, making these little demos. I knew that I couldn't finish them by myself.”
One of the few people she’d maintained contact with was Courtney Love, who would call her every other day. “Get to LA, you stupid fucking bitch,” Courtney would tell her. She’d become allergic to the rigid process of the studio in the UK and needed something real, so hopped on the flight and landed where Courtney had demanded she go. She had spare time on a random Friday and asked a friend to set her up with someone she had faith in—who she wouldn’t naturally assume would be the most obvious pairing based on the old Baby Queen sound.
That man was Alex Cassnoff, the Los Angeles-born producer known best for his collaborations with TKTK. That Friday, Bella rocked up to the studio. “I was just like, ‘I can't think of anything worse than writing a song today’, and he was just like, ‘Thank God’.” Instead, they spent the day making sound boards and talking. “His instincts were exactly what my ear wanted to hear.” They worked on it together, both in Los Angeles and London.
And so these songs came together in the room with a mix of live instrumentation and synth. Together, Bella and Alex rinsed Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, The Beatles’ White Album, Liz Phair’s debut Exile in Guyville, Aphex Twin, Steve Reich (“weirdly”), and the works of Randy Newman – all of his stuff that’s not in Toy Story.
The album’s title track, “I Hope You Don’t Remember Me”, is the commanding first taste you get of it, named so because, as Bella puts it, “there’s something ridiculous about it. Overly dramatic and extreme.” The track—the last one written but inspired by the first, a “self deprecating ode to rejection” called “Word Vomit”—is an antidote to the famous ballads about a fear of being forgotten. Bella calls it “part Beach Boys, part Robyn”, it’s a scintillating, bait-and-switch pop track that simultaneously sounds bitter and forgiving. Not long after she wrote “Word Vomit”, a song called “Feel Something” came to her, about forbidden romance and the way being so lovestruck can override your common sense. “It’s wild and free and perhaps more emotionally naive than the rest of the record,” she says.
Bella’s feelings are probably best captured in “Permanently Obsessed”, an “off-kilter and crazy song about my repeated cycle of behaviour,” as she puts it. The subject of the song had taken up so much of her headspace that she was slipping into Bella’s daily conversation. “You really hear that unreliable narrator,” she says.
For all of its scything and tricky feelings, it does have a heart—an unequivocal love song about a subject the album both tears down and fawns over with equal feeling: “Abigail”. “It’s a love song about a person and how magical they are,” is how Bella describes it. It was so candid there was a time she wrestled with even releasing it. “And then you realise that you've created something that is a pure description of the experience. It's not cloaked in satire. It's raw emotion.“ It was the manifestation of her “rock star fantasy” too. The drums were performed by Carla Azar, who’s worked with PJ Harvey and Jack White, while Michael Shuman of Queens of the Stone Age played bass.
The realisations rolled in continuously. On “The Protagonist”, one of the songs most dear to Bella’s heart, she ruminated over the role she plays in someone else’s life, how she was treated, and how she too is culpable of being that way for other people. “I wrote about my experience as a side character in someone else’s story, or collateral damage. It’s about how we have a set of rules for ourselves and a set of rules for other people. It's also about the cycle of pain.”
“This was not an album made for anyone else,” Bella says of I Hope You Don’t Remember Me. “It's not sending words of encouragement to anyone. There's no message. There's no resolution.” Instead, it’s an achingly true record that asks yourself to see yourself in its specificities: in that cycle of pain, and the sardonic way we can brush it off. We all tell ourselves we’re fine and we can move on from things—Baby Queen’s I Hope You Don’t Remember Me is for the deluded heartbroken person inside all of us. Years on, Bella’s in therapy; she’s smoking weed again, for balance. Unsurprisingly, the girl is still on her mind.
Expand“It was an avoidance of healing, throwing myself into creation,” she describes it as now, with a year of removal from the worst point of it, a brief period of pot abstinence, and a therapist now in her life. “Then when it was finally finished and I listened back, I was like: ‘Fuck. This person needs help.’”
Bella’s artistic name was built on biting sociopolitical stuff. Her fans have always looked to her as a musician who talked about how fucked up the world had become. On early EPs and mixtapes, like 2020’s Medicine and The Yearbook in 2021, she was skewering the internet (“Internet Religion”), obsession with body image (“Pretty Girl Lie”), and narcotics (“These Drugs”). It was crystallized on her debut album, Quarter Life Crisis—a hot streaming hit that coincided with an appearance in the Netflix behemoth Heartstopper. But this state of the nation outlook, in which she became a conduit for her generation’s feelings, also became a box of sorts. “I always felt like Baby Queen had to be speaking about those things,” she says now. “But for the longest time I hadn't been in love.”
That’s when something changed. A couple of years ago, Bella fell for someone, hard and messy, “and when you’re in love, it shines a light onto all the cobwebbed corners and the cracks. Everything that's unhealed.”
What followed was one of the most intense experiences of her life: a romance that felt seismic but strange, that ended slowly until—sensing agony around the bend—she broke away from it entirely. “I just destroyed this thing before I could even say how I felt,” she says. “I never even once said how I felt to this person.”
From it, she wrote I Hope You Don’t Remember Me, a crushingly real album about a sort-of break-up, made from the messiness of her unmedicated feelings. After years of looking out into the world and commenting on all that caught her eye, she’s made an album about the ugliness of her insides.
The material she was searching for came to her out of the blue at the end of 2024, “and it opened a floodgate,” she says. At first, while writing this music, she remembers thinking: This doesn't feel like Baby Queen. But it was pure. She told herself: “You have to put it out. You're doing a disservice to yourself if you don’t.” And so the process began.
“All I've done for the past few years is be a musician,” Bella says. She locked herself in her room, smoked weed and wrote about what was bothering her. Her minor ideas turning into major ones, splintering off in different directions until there were dozens, if not hundreds of them. “I just committed to the bit fully, making these little demos. I knew that I couldn't finish them by myself.”
One of the few people she’d maintained contact with was Courtney Love, who would call her every other day. “Get to LA, you stupid fucking bitch,” Courtney would tell her. She’d become allergic to the rigid process of the studio in the UK and needed something real, so hopped on the flight and landed where Courtney had demanded she go. She had spare time on a random Friday and asked a friend to set her up with someone she had faith in—who she wouldn’t naturally assume would be the most obvious pairing based on the old Baby Queen sound.
That man was Alex Cassnoff, the Los Angeles-born producer known best for his collaborations with TKTK. That Friday, Bella rocked up to the studio. “I was just like, ‘I can't think of anything worse than writing a song today’, and he was just like, ‘Thank God’.” Instead, they spent the day making sound boards and talking. “His instincts were exactly what my ear wanted to hear.” They worked on it together, both in Los Angeles and London.
And so these songs came together in the room with a mix of live instrumentation and synth. Together, Bella and Alex rinsed Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, The Beatles’ White Album, Liz Phair’s debut Exile in Guyville, Aphex Twin, Steve Reich (“weirdly”), and the works of Randy Newman – all of his stuff that’s not in Toy Story.
The album’s title track, “I Hope You Don’t Remember Me”, is the commanding first taste you get of it, named so because, as Bella puts it, “there’s something ridiculous about it. Overly dramatic and extreme.” The track—the last one written but inspired by the first, a “self deprecating ode to rejection” called “Word Vomit”—is an antidote to the famous ballads about a fear of being forgotten. Bella calls it “part Beach Boys, part Robyn”, it’s a scintillating, bait-and-switch pop track that simultaneously sounds bitter and forgiving. Not long after she wrote “Word Vomit”, a song called “Feel Something” came to her, about forbidden romance and the way being so lovestruck can override your common sense. “It’s wild and free and perhaps more emotionally naive than the rest of the record,” she says.
Bella’s feelings are probably best captured in “Permanently Obsessed”, an “off-kilter and crazy song about my repeated cycle of behaviour,” as she puts it. The subject of the song had taken up so much of her headspace that she was slipping into Bella’s daily conversation. “You really hear that unreliable narrator,” she says.
For all of its scything and tricky feelings, it does have a heart—an unequivocal love song about a subject the album both tears down and fawns over with equal feeling: “Abigail”. “It’s a love song about a person and how magical they are,” is how Bella describes it. It was so candid there was a time she wrestled with even releasing it. “And then you realise that you've created something that is a pure description of the experience. It's not cloaked in satire. It's raw emotion.“ It was the manifestation of her “rock star fantasy” too. The drums were performed by Carla Azar, who’s worked with PJ Harvey and Jack White, while Michael Shuman of Queens of the Stone Age played bass.
The realisations rolled in continuously. On “The Protagonist”, one of the songs most dear to Bella’s heart, she ruminated over the role she plays in someone else’s life, how she was treated, and how she too is culpable of being that way for other people. “I wrote about my experience as a side character in someone else’s story, or collateral damage. It’s about how we have a set of rules for ourselves and a set of rules for other people. It's also about the cycle of pain.”
“This was not an album made for anyone else,” Bella says of I Hope You Don’t Remember Me. “It's not sending words of encouragement to anyone. There's no message. There's no resolution.” Instead, it’s an achingly true record that asks yourself to see yourself in its specificities: in that cycle of pain, and the sardonic way we can brush it off. We all tell ourselves we’re fine and we can move on from things—Baby Queen’s I Hope You Don’t Remember Me is for the deluded heartbroken person inside all of us. Years on, Bella’s in therapy; she’s smoking weed again, for balance. Unsurprisingly, the girl is still on her mind.