waterbaby - Memory Be A Blade

While her 2023 EP ‘Foam’ introduced Stockholm artist waterbaby in melancholic soft focus, this full-length debut moves with darker intent, its eight tracks denser, richer in arrangement and sharper in interrogation. Across ‘Memory Be A Blade’, she circles her memories not to wallow but to examine how they have shaped her, particularly in the aftermath of two relationships that reframed the record as it was being made. That sense of shifting meaning runs through the album’s emotional core, as songs written in the relative safety of one romance take on a different weight once it ends. The result is a body of work that feels unsettled in the most compelling way.

‘Amiss’ wrestles with questions that have no easy resolution, its slow burn arrangement framing a vocal that hovers between restraint and release, as if she is still deciding in real time. ‘Beck n Call’ widens the frame. Featuring a verse from her brother ttoh, the song introduces a familial intimacy to the album’s exploration of validation and worth. Their interplay feels unguarded, lending warmth even as the lyrics probe the discomfort of moulding the self to fit another’s expectations.

ttoh also appears on ‘Clay’, which began as a freestyle over collaborator Marcus White’s super-pitched-up guitar. The track carries the same rawness that defines the album’s most affecting moments. Like the title track, ‘Clay’ finds waterbaby reflecting on her desire to be seen as worthy of love. This gradual shedding of her people-pleasing tendencies also fed into the way the album took shape, encouraged to lean into long freestyles. Lines feel discovered rather than constructed, giving the record an intimacy that borders on intrusive. Paired with arrangements that draw on her classical background, complete with strings, horns and piano, the effect is expansive yet fragile. 

‘Memory Be a Blade’ captures an artist in transition: rather than offering neat conclusions, waterbaby sits with her discomfort, turning nostalgia from a place of safety into a site of reckoning.