Bathe: Inside The Inside Voice(s)

Brooklyn-based duo Bathe, comprising singer-songwriter Devin Hobdy and guitarist-producer Corey Smith-West, first crossed paths in college while living in a shared house with other aspiring musicians. Exchanging tips on using Ableton Live, they decided to combine their talents and passion for classic R&B, pop, songwriting and hip hop, creating their debut LP, Bicoastal, in 2021. Released during the midst of the pandemic, the album’s rich, emotional blend of soulful vocals and psychedelic indie rock quickly gained traction, striking a chord with a broad audience in search of mental escape.

Several years on and now a rising force in the indie R&B scene, Bathe saw the need for a new perspective on their second LP, Inside Voice(s). As the duo emerged from the confines of lockdown relatively unscathed, they soon found themselves grappling with a fresh set of challenges that left them feeling equally uncertain. Thankfully, the creation of Inside Voice(s) and its shimmering universe of sounds and songs is proving to be just as effective at resolving their emotional conflicts, while offering listeners yet another wellspring of solace.

We talked to Bathe recently about the evolution of their sound, the nature of their collaboration, the murky definition of R&B and much more. Plus they share the Live Set of the instrumental version of their track “Avalon” as a free download.

Download the Live Set of Bathe’s “Avalon Instrumental”

Please note: This Live Set and included samples are for educational use only and cannot be used for commercial purposes. Requires Ableton Live 12 Standard or Suite.

Was the Bathe project always going to be about your shared love of R&B, and where does that passion derive?

DH: I'd say it was kind of unavoidable as Corey and I have pretty similar upbringings. We're obviously people of colour who grew up in the United States with Caribbean heritage, but our parents were always playing R&B, soul, jazz, and funk music around the house. It's the music that soundtracked my Sunday mornings when we were cleaning up or when mom was prepping dinner. As musicians, at some point you naturally start to poke in different directions to discover your musical influences and, for me, there was a really important moment where the music collective Soulection became really popular. I guess that’s when I realised that my love for R&B was always there and all the other acquired interests and genres that I’d picked up along the way could be combined to create something beautiful and unique. 

CSW: When I was a kid growing up in Connecticut, I was constantly being driven around by my mom who was putting on The Spinners, The Chi-Lites or The Temptations, and more recent R&B like Ginuwine. Then in my free time I would listen to alternative hip hop, like MF Doom, People Under the Stairs or The Alchemist and his entire cohort. All I wanted to do was chop records, so when I started on Ableton I began making hip hop tracks until I met Dev, which reignited that love of RnB music.

Did you consider it a challenge to create a soulful R&B sound in the box?

CSW: In the context of popular music, the R&B label is awarded to anything that has a justifiable link to the black musical canon and isn't explicitly rap music. For instance, the new FKA Twigs album, Eusexua, is considered R&B, but if you look at a list of the Grammy nominees for R&B over the last 10 years it’s such an eclectic roster of people that approach the genre so differently. There’s a simplicity that binds all of us together, but it starts to get more complex when you think about where we can take things. As creators, we tend to get bored really easily and constantly try to push the envelope regarding where we think Bathe can go, but within that R&B serves as a home base – something we can always fall back on whilst knowing there’s a line of inspiration to creators like Marvin Gaye, Prince, or even Sampha.

Your debut LP, Bicoastal, really struck a chord. Did you find that it appealed to a specific segment of the R&B audience or were you a beneficiary of the genre becoming more inclusive?

CSW: I’d say that modern life right now is very stressful and throughout those periods people tend to gravitate towards chiller music, which is the category we’re in. When we play shows we always meet people who say we’re one of the only R&B groups they listen to, while others tell us they love listening to R&B but are there because we do it in a certain way.

DH: When we put out Bicoastal the pandemic was reaching its climax. People weren't able to move, travel or envision a world beyond the confines of their apartments or homes. Obviously, the album has its appeal to a particular R&B demographic, but it seemed to have a broader appeal to people who had aspirations to re-join the outside world - a sort of thematic resonance. At the time, I remember us making the song "Schönefeld" and we literally structured the entire song in Ableton from the core loop and sent it to each other over Zoom [laughs].

Your mood at the time must have influenced the lyrical content, if not the music, so when it came to writing your new LP, Inside Voice(s), how did the narrative change?

DH: Bicoastal was very aspirational and escapist. Its thematic core is like, hey, I'm in this place that I don't want to be, so what if I were completely somewhere else? Inside Voice(s) is a much more mature and grounded take on self-reflection. It's not about escaping your circumstances but coming to terms with the voices we've inherited from our parents, society, or our own internal voices and trying to make sense of those things. The goal is resolution – to work through the noise and try to find something that's coherent and makes sense to us. It's less bright and maybe a lot more evidence of our maturation as people and musicians.

Do lyrics trigger musical ideas or does there need to be some sort of foundation to build from?

DH: There's a world where I have a dream where someone says something to me and that phrase becomes something I continually repeat until it finds a melody that Corey and I flesh out. Alternatively, it could just be a melody that pops into either of our heads and we assign gibberish to it until it starts to make sense. We took a songwriting class once and were told that sometimes you'll find truth in your gibberish, and the more you say it the more likely you are to find something you were trying to say subconsciously.

CSW: I started off as a beat maker inspired by people like Madlib and MF Doom in a culture where I’d wake up every day and make beats. That’s now evolved into waking up every day and making ideas, whether it's writing a riff on the guitar, making a drum loop or taking a synth and running it through every granular plugin I can find to try and find some sort of texture, sound or sequence of notes that feels like it inspires a strong emotion. Then I’ll present that to Dev to see if it inspires him.

What role does Ableton play in that process?

CSW: The fun part about Ableton is just being able to create, but I see the different phases really clearly. I might be in vertical [Session] view doing pure ideation, where it doesn't matter to me how the idea is going to exist on the timeline, but there's a key moment where you go into horizontal [Arrangement] view and get more particular about what goes where and when. When you get to the automation stage, you’re questioning whether all the elements are speaking to each other and at the end you're just nit-picking and asking what's on the master chain. Other times, Dev opens his computer, there’s a fully fleshed out demo and I'm like, holy crap!

You mentioned using Zoom during Covid to send ideas back and forth. Did you get used to working in that way or is there a point in the process where you need to work in person and get into the weeds?

CSW: We started out as two separate projects and joined into one because we lived in a house with a ton of musicians. It was like The Ableton Squad - everyone was making beats, we all had a studio in our attic and whenever we’d hear something and a door was open we’d run up and make suggestions. That turned into this, so we do work separately and see studio time as an ideas exchange where we’re always diverging and converging.

As a beat maker, is that your primary creative source for musical ideas?

CSW: I love playing guitar, so there’s a lot of it across the album. A lot of the time I'll start away from Ableton and try to come up with a loop, chord progression or bass line, play it into Clip View and use all the tools to try and figure out the different colours and directions I can take. What I'm really looking for is that brief flash when you just hear the whole song done in your head.

DH: Corey’s like an art teacher who’s learned technique and the best use cases for applying different colours, whereas I'm a child with paint throwing things at the canvas and seeing what sticks. My goal isn't to get something that's perfectly recorded with the most pristine effects chain flawlessly EQ’d and compressed; I need to get to something that accurately demonstrates what I have inside my head. Oftentimes I'm starting with external gear. For example, I'll mess around with little modules like my TR-09 or JU-06 emulators. Once I find something rhythmical, I'll use Ableton as a means of recording in the knowledge that we can accurately recreate it at a later date.

What’s your approach to recording vocals?

DH: I'll record my best vocal take directly into Ableton under really crappy recording conditions. We’ve found that you can’t always recreate the emotion of a take and always end up going back to the first recording with all its imperfections. However, we are trying to refine that process.

CSW: For a very long time, Dev and I had no clue what we were doing. We'd explain our recording process to people and they’d say, no, that's exactly the wrong way to do it. It was definitely a trial by fire, but that's also part of the fun. Every time you go to make another record, you have to question what you’ve learned from the last one, but I've also been doing a lot of producing on the side for other folks, so I'm excited to work on whatever's coming next because I know that it’s going to be a completely new iteration of our approach to recording. For me, the most underrated tool in Ableton is the info box. So many people ask me for advice and I always say did you go to the info box first? People be sleeping, because it has 99% of the information you need.

A lot of electronic music is very sequenced and structured. How do you get the balance right between over-producing and allowing some looseness so the songs feel more musical?

CSW: The best trick is just to close your eyes, listen to the combination of sounds you're hearing and imagine how you can manipulate them. If you get really obsessed about seeing everything on the grid there’s a risk of creating something that sounds sterile because you’re just doing what looks right. If you follow your ears, I think it becomes easier to make something artful that evokes the vibe you’re looking for.

There appears to be quite a lot of field recordings integrated into the music, from fragments of female vocals to environmental sounds. Is that to explain the narrative and where would you typically go to source those sounds?

CSW: Coming from an alternative hip hop background specifically, I really love sloppiness in music and think that’s something where R&B is a little different to pure electronic music. I'm not saying that electronic music can't be sloppy, but that sloppiness is almost like an indicator of life. Over the years, Dev and I have got into the habit of just picking up our iPhones and recording until we have a bank of fragments from day-to-day life that we can insert into a song to help evoke the emotion we want.

Joe Visciano was the mix engineer for this project. Was he specifically chosen for his work with Kendrick Lamar?

CSW: The song that made us realise that Joe was the one for us was "Lil Thing" by Knox Fortune. I’d listen to that song every day in college and loved the way it sounded sonically, but scrolling through Joe's catalogue you have Frank Ocean, Doja Cat, and what seems like the whole of Spotify. It's great to get a new set of ears in the room, particularly when you’re getting super granular on sounds or need a referee to choose the right compressor, and I feel like Joe got us perfectly even though we were surprised by how little he did. Not in the sense that he didn't do his job, but his approach is more like, okay, what are the elements that are stopping this track from being the best it can be? Then he’d hone in, make those tweaks and open the entire thing up until you're listening to a song and thinking, you mean to tell me I made this?

Perhaps unusually, Inside Voice(s) is arriving in two segments. In September, you released the first half and rest is coming in March…

DH: The album does sort of naturally split into two halves. Thematically, one side feels a bit lighter and more optimistic and the other feels darker and more rooted in reality. The real answer, however, is that we live in a world where we can strategically elongate the marketing by putting out two halves and release three singles from each [smiles].

Is it also about your nostalgic love of vinyl and what the two sides of an album represent?

CSW: Vinyl has been ever-present in my life. Even in college, I’d go to all the record stores, get the dollar records and try to sample them. My mom grew up during the height of soul and has the original pressings of a lot of the classic soul records. She’d always say, “Corey, I better not come down there and see you with my vinyl!,” so at 1 in the morning I’d sneak downstairs, grab a vinyl, copy the entire thing and try to make beats out of it. I could give a dissertation about how the consumption of music has changed and what vinyl represents as a reaction to the streaming era, but I think people just want to be able to sit with an album and actually spend time with the music in a way that streaming just can't provide. 

Follow Bathe on Bandcamp and Instagram

Text and interview: Danny Turner
Photos courtesy of Guarionex Rodriguez, Jr/Troy Anthony Misita