Bathe didn’t expect their 2021 debut album, Bicoastal, to take off like it did.
The R&B duo, consisting of singer-songwriter Devin Hobdy and producer Corey Smith-West, had previously released I’ll Miss You in 2019, but it was Bicoastal that put them on the map. The heightened attention in a short time stirred up a flurry of emotions, particularly when it was time to work on their follow-up, Inside Voice(s): Side A, the first half of their upcoming album.
“Bicoastal, sort of overnight, became this thing that far outgrew what we expected for it to become,” Devin tells Rated R&B over Zoom. “All of a sudden, you’re sitting with this project you didn’t expect to do as well as it did. Now, you feel the stress of having to recreate that while wanting to develop in the ways you expect that you should be developing as an artist. There’s all this growth that you want to happen, but there’s all this pressure that you’re putting on yourself.”
Devin and Corey dedicated the last two years to channeling that pressure into their Inside Voice(s) project. “It’s kind of like this diamond; it’s this pressurized version of all the feelings we were experiencing in the aftermath of Bicoastal,” says Devin. “It deals with a lot of the mental health issues we were encountering during that period. It chronicles a lot of the growth we’ve had over that period as well.”
Where Bicoastal was about finding solace wherever you are, Inside Voices embarks on a more introspective journey — one that requires two parts. Devin explains, “The first half is definitely the inside voices that are a bit kinder to yourself. Those are the voices that are like, ‘Hey, you know what? I can do this. You know what? I’m going to give myself grace today.’” He continues, “Side B sort of leans into those darker, more invasive thoughts.”
Side A was preceded by the lead single “Avalon,” expressing a yearning to escape everyday routine. “Both Dev and I have worked more dead-end office jobs than we can count. We wrote ‘Avalon’ about those days where your body is stuck in your cubicle, but your mind is far away somewhere that’s sunny, tropical, warm, and filled with nectarines.”
The Brooklyn-based duo followed up with “Fields,” a lush and balmy track about being in the sun-drenched wilderness with a love interest while on psychedelics.
“‘Fields’ is a song about being out in nature with your crush on psychedelics,” Bathe previously explained. “We wanted to hone in on the bubbly euphoric feeling of laying out in the fields on a sunny day with someone you love.”
In Rated R&B’s interview with Bathe, the duo discusses their Inside Voice(s): Side A EP and their upcoming album.
Bicoastal was your second project overall, following 2019’s I’ll Miss You. Why do you think it resonated with so many people?
COREY SMITH-WEST: I think the project came from a really real place. A large portion of it was made over the pandemic — so feeling stuck and wanting to be somewhere else. When you make music that comes from your real life, when other people hit that point in their life, they resonate with it. If the powers that be put it in the right place at the right time for people to find it, then they want to spend time with it because it feels real to them. I think it was a real project. It was a learning lesson in the merits of making music that is true to you rather than doing something you think people like but maybe isn’t the most authentic.
Your music overall is very vivid. How do you stay creatively inspired?
DEVIN HOBDY: The way we frame our music is it’s an act of storytelling. I think we’ve gotten better at it, so now people are actually understanding what we’re trying to communicate. With that said, we’re both avid film lovers. We read a lot and we listen too. We chronicle the experiences of our families and those family histories. It’s like we’re just collecting stories from wherever we can find them, whether it’s on-screen, in a podcast, a book, or from a conversation we had with a good friend. We’re constantly using them as fuel with respect for the worlds we’re trying to create with our music. With that sort of being the way we approach writing, we tend to draw inspiration from places people maybe won’t go in our realm. It always makes for some really interesting songs sometimes.
COREY: Also, just being kind to your ideas. I think everybody is as creative as anybody else. I think sometimes, particularly in adulthood, you get really afraid of having a bad idea. A bad idea for a business could be financial ruin; a bad idea for a relationship could be a lot of pain and anguish. It’s really easy to want to run from any idea that isn’t perfect as soon as it pops up. I think learning to be like, “This came from my brain and I have a certain amount of love for myself. Therefore, I’m going to extend that to every idea.” I think it brings you to some places maybe you would’ve said no to if you hadn’t given every idea a chance.
What was your intention with Inside Voice(s)?
COREY: I think our intention was to follow up Bicoastal by making an album that felt more real to us with songs on it that we stand by, that never grow old to us because they’re rooted in something that is so prevalent in our lives that they’re just constantly renewed. I feel like we accomplished that. The beautiful thing with Bicoastal is we got surprised by where people took the record and what they decided it was about. I’m excited to see what resonates with people, especially when the other side comes out. I’m excited for people to see the full picture. I want to hear what everyone else takes away from it.
You mentioned Inside Voice(s) was made for overthinkers. How do you deal with overthinking in your creative process?
COREY: For me, it’s been learning to show more kindness to myself, to show more love to myself, to be more accepting of myself and to let go of the metrics of success and failure and normalcy. When you say you’re an overthinker, you’re judging yourself in a barometer of what is a normal amount of thinking. But there is no normal; there’s only what society or the media has told you. I think when you start letting that stuff go and trying to show love to yourself, you are your own best friend. I think it makes it a lot easier to be like, “You know what? I am overstimulated right now. You know what? I am moving in 20 different directions at once. You know what? I need to sit down with a piece of paper and write this out instead of just keeping it all in my brain.” And you can start moving. Once you start making yourself feel bad for having an overly active mind, I think you can actually start to engage with it.
DEVIN: The name of the project is Inside Voice(s), and there are two sides. The first half is definitely the inside voices that are a bit kinder to yourself. Those are the voices that are like, “Hey, you know what? I can do this. You know what? I’m going to give myself grace today.” Side B sort of leans into those darker, more invasive thoughts. Part of this concept of Inside Voice(s) is the idea that your community, the people that you love, can also eventually, with time, become the hearts of your internal monologue. They can be people that help you realize when it feels like you’re potentially overthinking [and] when it feels like you’re giving a problem a bit too much space to grow and spiral out of control.
I think part of what keeps us from overthinking creatively in our lives as well as having each other as parts of each other’s internal monologues. It’s like I can literally go like, “Hey, Corey, here’s this thing.” And then Corey is like, “I can see through the nonsense right now,” and cut straight to the heart of the matter. I think we do that for each other in our personal lives and in music, which is a great sort of balance to have.
Why did you decide to release your new album in two parts?
COREY: No one has any real tolerance for fully-formed journeys — it feels as much, not to insult the audience or anything like that. I’m the same way, too. I find that rather than giving out a multi-phase idea, it felt right to have both of these chapters and give them some time to stand alone so they could be the thing that they were supposed to be a hundred percent. Side A is mostly warm and fuzzy, with a little bit of melancholy. Side B is melancholy, with some warm fuzzies tucked away. It just felt right to let both stand on their own for a little bit and get their time in the sun before ultimately combining them.
I would much rather make music that meets people where they’re at and what it’s supposed to be. It’s like when you go into the ocean, you don’t go to the bottom of the ocean to enjoy the ocean. You can just sit up; you can float on the top and have an experience. And if you’re really serious, you can put on diving gear and really dive in there and do whatever you want. I want to make sure that there’s enough depth to the music to meet people however deep they want to go.
It felt like the best way to encourage people to dig deep was to split it up. In the current music listener climate, it felt like if we had put the whole thing out, it would’ve been one of those albums where, in six years, someone came back and was like, “Oh, I get this song is really the turning point of the album.” It’s like, “Nah, we try to get that from day one.”
What’s the story behind the opening track “Badada”?
DEVIN: I grew up in South Side Jamaica, Queens. There were days I would walk around and see what was happening on Jamaica Avenue. It would be different people, but I would see the same social interactions happening. And I was like, “Yo, this is so weird. But it’s also that repetition that kind of makes this place feel like home.” It’s also that repetition that I can imagine makes it — people talk of generational curses. I don’t really indulge, but I see how that talk comes about when you feel like a neighborhood is plunged in sort of the same cycles of whatever it is for decades. “Badada” is me recounting what I saw growing up there and how it feels like the same things are happening regardless. It could be the south side of Jamaica. It could be the south side of Chicago. It could be whatever areas sort of disenfranchised. It was a set of observations that can hopefully feel universal to anyone who’s grown up in that environment.
What inspired “Furloughed”?
COREY: It’s in response to Bicoastal a little bit. Bicoastal was about, “I want to be somewhere else,” and Inside Voice(s) is like, “I went somewhere else. I came back, and everything’s the same.” That kind of goes into “Furloughed.” “Furloughed” has always been about this aimless malaise of late 20s, early 30s life. They’re just drifting, at least for us, specifically drifting between jobs. So, “Am I talking to my friends enough? Am I calling my girl enough? I need some time alone, but I can’t get the time alone. If I’m alone, then I’m not making money if I’m not.” It’s just kind of about that quest and desire for a deeper connection.
DEVIN: I feel like that period — late 20s, early 30s — part of your life feels like you figured out a bunch of things, but you’re putting a lot of relationships on hold. You’re putting certain forms of self-development on hold to get to this period that you think your 30s is supposed to be, where you’ve got things figured out, but you’re kind of denying a lot of the things that make you happy for the sake of some trajectory that you’re not even sure you’re actually on.
What does “Bad News” represent?
DEVIN: I have a penchant for making things either dark or mystical or horror-adjacent. “Bad News” was me dipping my toes into the mystical waters without it getting too dark, trying to keep it a bit light. I was like, “What if you went to a psychic, and they were just like, ‘Hey, you got some real horrible stuff coming in the pipeline for you.’” Then, I started with that idea and fleshed out a light little narrative. I thought that it was a cute, cheeky way of making the music we like to make, but talking about something that wasn’t love or yearning, making it as thematic and as narrative as other forms of music are allowed to be.
COREY: At first that song wasn’t going to make it on the album, but I was like, “This has to be on the album.” To me, it’s like you think about your inside voices and such a big part of that is just anxiety about the future.
You conclude Inside Voice(s): Side A with “Pieces.” What was your intention with that song?
DEVIN: It’s just about me really loving my girlfriend. I do kind of have an aversion to writing love songs. So if I’m going to write it, I want to write about the parts of love that are more boring. Keeping your relationship alive after years of being together is much more, in my opinion, interesting than the initial courting period; that’s all well-trodden. But what’s more mundane and more real for most people, I think, is the reality of keeping the flame alive. That’s what “Pieces” is to me. It’s like, “Hey, we’ve been at this for a while. Here are the small things that we do to keep the flame alive.”
Stream Bathe’s new EP Inside Voice(s): Side A below.
