Baywaves get hypnotic on new track ‘Down 4 U’

After last year’s ‘Only For Uz’ EP, Madrid-based indie-pop band Baywaves released their latest single ‘Gliss’ back in June.

Now they’re back with another shimmering new one that’s guaranteed to send you straight back to summer. ‘Down 4 U’ was recorded at the same time as ‘Gliss’ and was mixed by Jarvis Taveniere (who’s worked with Woods, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Real Estate to name a few). It features the same lilting, jangly guitar melodies with hazy, psych-pop vibes. It’s another perfectly crafted slice of their own brand of “hipnopop”.

The band will also be heading off across the UK in October for their first headline tour of the country. Tickets are on sale now.

We caught up with Baywaves to talk about the new single, what the Madrid scene is like right now and their plans. Have a listen to ‘Down 4 U’ and read the full chat below.

Hello Baywaves! How are you?

Hi! We have just got back to Madrid, after a couple of weeks recording in an amazing studio in the north of Spain, just in time for the release of ‘Down 4 U’ and we haven’t even got time to get back into the routine. We are still in that dizzy phase of “what day is it today?” and starting to prepare the upcoming tour. We are happy, excited and tired, but mostly happy and excited.

Tell us a little bit about your new single ‘Down 4 U’…

‘Down 4 U’, like our last single ‘Gliss’, was born while we were touring our first EP. Our first songs, played live, felt quite hard-hitting so we wanted to have a mellow love song to play amid those tunes. When we sat down to record it we spent a lot of time geeking with vintage synths and keys, perfecting the vocal effects and working on the arrangements, so it ended up having a yatchy 70s pop vibe to it.

You’re also coming back to the UK for your first headline tour - how have your experiences here been before?

Yes we are! The other day talking to a friend we realized that we have played in London as much as we have in Madrid; we also played the End of the Road last year and we’ve been to Brighton a couple of times. Every time we go, apart from enjoying 4am fried chicken after the shows, we feel that the crowd is happy to have you there as you’re a band from abroad, and people comes to greet you after shows and stuff like that, which is something that doesn’t really happen in Spain and is really heart-warming.

Do you think Madrid and Spain as a whole is becoming an easier place to get discovered as a band from?

We haven’t been asked this before! We’ve talked several times about how Madrid and the Spanish scene in general has been in bloom lately and how the city feels stimulating, but in terms of getting discovered… I would say yes, probably because when Hinds landed in the UK and some of the English media put the spotlight on Madrid/Spain, they discovered that we had a bunch of other really good bands here and probably thought something like “we’ve been missing on an a cool thing here, let’s keep an eye on this”.

What are your plans after the tour? Might we see an album soon?

We still have to put the finishing touches on a four song EP that will ideally see the light early next year, which broadens our sound quite a bit, but yes, we’ve finally decided that the time to make the album has come hahahaha. We’ve been messing around with new ideas, still in the making, but we will probably play new stuff on this tour to see how it feels.

Tags: Baywaves, News, Listen