BABii

Balancing sweet, dreamy vocals with industrial soundscapes that burn with acid, Daredevil2000, the new album from Bristol-based BABii, unveils a more personal mode. An inquiry into violence both personal and political, the album continues BABii's penchant for worldbuilding, with comic book-like storytelling and a toothsome cyberpunk aesthetic. Listen to her TANK Mix below, and read some of the inspirations that went into Daredevil2000.

Dante's Inferno

BABii I got really hung up on Dante's Inferno as a framework for the album, with every song as a different circle of Hell. The album’s journey feels like you are circling and getting closer to something like a resolution. I don’t know if there’s a resolution to Hell, because in the poem, Hell is technically a circle. Dante is trying to go to Mount Purgatory to find his long-lost love who’s died. He has to go to Heaven to find her, but the only way to Heaven is by going down through Hell, then up to Purgatory. When he gets to the center of Hell, where the Devil is, he climbs through a hole in Hell's centre, only to end up at the bottom of Mount Purgatory. It's like a feedback loop – there’s no resolution. I haven't read the poem in its entirety, but I know a lot about it now, and I own two copies of it. It was one of the starting points for the album, which is trying to translate this feeling of capitalist Hell in the real world.

Deepfake porn

BABii The Dante’s Inferno mechanism was useful until I had to write about the level I had been avoiding, the circle of lust. For the other circles of Hell, I understood their gravity, but with lust, I was like “What is the actual crime here?” I couldn't think of what to do for ages until I was on Instagram, doomscrolling, and I came across this documentary about deepfake pornography. It’s such a strange form of violation and an indirect way of thinking about lust. It’s crazy how you can take someone’s identity, apply it to a scenario and create a fantasy without their consent. The song “J0YR1D3” came out of thinking about it.

Grief

BABii A lot of the album has to do with grieving after my dad passed away. He was a complicated man, both a bad guy and a good guy depending on who you spoke to. He was not always on what you would consider the right side of the law. It was an interesting way to grieve and process my complicated feelings about him by making songs about violence, but it makes a lot of sense considering his character.

Ice hockey

BABii My dad was quite a promising ice hockey keeper playing at the AAA level, which is where the National Hockey League gets all its players from. His dad was a jock-type guy who taught his kids boxing and ice skating and baseball. He was in the Navy, coached on all the teams, and was a boxer as well. My dad would get beaten the shit out of all the time playing hockey, and then if he didn't do well, his dad would also beat the shit out of him. It was a world of violence that continued later into his life, which made sense because that's the energy that he understood. He didn't like talking about ice hockey that much, because there was a lot of pain around it. Ice hockey influenced the song “TRA$$$her” in particular. 

XL bullies

BABii There's a song on the album called “XL Bully”, which is about the stereotypical, football hooligan, right-wing white supremacist guy. I wanted the song to be purely violent but also have this question of, am I doing violence because I'm hurting myself? Am I expressing my insides outwardly? A lot of this album is about trying to empathise with someone or something people think is evil. XL bullies are very associated with that stereotype. It's a hard life to be an XL bully – or any kind of bully – because you still have affection and love. You're still a dog. The muzzles and cages people put them in almost make it worse for them: if you condemn a person, they end up living up to that expectation like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was a process of reflection on badness, but with the understanding that everyone is a human at the end of the day.

Pranks

BABii One day this little kid ran up to me and was like, “Can I have five pounds?” I was like, what? And he was like, “Oh, it's just a dare.” He bottled it! As soon as he said that, I was like, ah, you cheeky little daredevil, and then thought, daredevil is such a cool word. And I was like, I want to make an album called “daredevil”.

Artist Jun Suemi

BABii He made some concept art for this video game called Wizardry of this very innocent-looking young girl with all of these demons around her. I loved the picture and it seemed so right to try and recreate the painting as the photograph for my album cover. 

Daredevil2000 is out on 11th October.