Stockholm's waterbaby on nostalgia, vulnerability, and debut album 'Memory Be A Blade' • Neu • DIY Magazine

There’s something contradictory about waterbaby. On our Zoom call, the Stockholm-born singer-songwriter speaks in careful, measured sentences, each word chosen with intent and deliberation. “I’m so scared of being misunderstood,” she admits, almost as if confronting the thought there and then. “To feel seen is such a crazy thing - it’s very beautiful, and very jarring. It’s literally life-affirming.” And yet, her debut album, ‘Memory Be a Blade’, is deeply vulnerable; a collection of thoughts built from improvised lyrics, unguarded feelings, and fragments she didn’t fully understand until she heard them played back to her.

The album follows her 2023 EP ‘Foam’, and while that release had sharper edges, ‘Memory Be a Blade’ is a softer, hazier blend of bedroom pop and R&B, as if she’d taken the decision to view her art through the same rose-tinted glasses with which she views the past. Some of this shift in sound comes down to geography. Written between LA and her native Sweden, the transatlantic to-and-fro left her feeling unmoored, a feeling that seeped into the music. “Travelling makes me very dreamy and a bit less grounded,” she says. That lack of grounding, as it turns out, became one of the album’s defining features.

‘Memory Be a Blade’ also began in pain. While it came to life as a way for her to process the end of a relationship, her songs took on a different meaning when, midway through writing, a second breakup followed. Rather than sitting down to confront her feelings head-on, she found a different way in. She began freestyling lyrics over looped melodies to bypass self-censorship, breaking down the barriers between herself and what she was saying. Initially, this made for “a lot of gibberish”, as she’s quick to note, but the final result was something much more honest than deliberate writing ever could have created. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what this is right now, but it sounds true, and it sounds pretty’,” she recalls. “I did not try to take it back.”

The truths that emerged in these sessions could be difficult to reckon with, and often, it wasn’t until months later, when something in her life had shifted, that she was able to truly understand the significance of what she’d said. In some cases, she didn’t even realise she’d written a lyric until she heard it played back. Take ‘Clay’, and the line “I’m like clay how you mould me / I, I twist and bend”: “I didn’t remember it, but it was listening back that I heard it,” she says. For someone who describes herself as “quite guarded emotionally”, the experience of being so exposed was overwhelming and cathartic in equal measure. “I also tried to not evaluate so much as much as I observed,” she adds.

“I’m very nostalgic and sentimental. I just have to let it not be my crutch too much.”

Its title captures this precisely. Memory, for waterbaby, isn’t always soft or nostalgic, as the album’s sound might suggest. Instead, it’s something with an edge, capable of cutting through the defences she’d spent years building up. “I’m very nostalgic and sentimental. I’m starting to think this is just me as a person,” she shares. “I just have to let it not be my crutch too much.” However, in this case, it’s proven to be a tool that has allowed her to confront her past at an angle, approaching difficult truths sideways rather than head-on.

The instrumentation works in a similar way. Across the album, her vocals are accompanied by flute, cello, clarinet, trombone, and saxophone, among others. Unlike the lyrics, the instruments don’t spell anything out. Instead, they occupy the “middle space between daydreaming and wishing and planning and real life”, carrying the emotional register where words fall short. waterbaby sang in her school choir, and there’s something in ‘Memory Be a Blade’ that feels like a return to that early relationship with music, letting feeling - rather than rationale - guide her sound.

The result is an album that sounds like a “house of nostalgia”, each song a different room and holding a different memory. Some of these rooms face inwards, others out: “Looking back at someone looking at me with [their] eyes was almost like a dopamine hit,” she says. “It would almost calm me down. Like a little kick.” It’s a habit that had followed her since long before the album. Still, she’d never put it into words, until, almost by accident, in the writing of the title track, collaborator Marcus White finally nailed what she’d been feeling: “My favourite me / Is still the girl / I used to be / In your eyes.”

It’s a striking image from someone who spent much of the record not quite knowing what she was saying. But that, perhaps, is the point. For as much as ‘Memory Be a Blade’ is an album about understanding the past, perhaps more importantly, it’s about letting it speak, and being willing to listen.

‘Memory Be A Blade’ is out now via Sub Pop.

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