Baby Rose & BADBADNOTGOOD Slow Burn 12" Vinyl LP Clear Smoke Colour 2024
Tracklist:
1. On My Mind
2. Slow Burn
3. Caroline feat. Mereba
4. Weekness
5. It’s Alright
6. One Last Dance
Less than a year after her album Through and Through, Baby Rose returns with SlowBurn, a collection of songs that explode her sonic palette from progressive R&B into a rawer, richerand more sprawling lens of American music. Here, Rose asserts herself as not only a once-in-ten-lifetimes vocalist, but as a formidable songwriter connecting the dots where Muscle Shoals meetspsych, psych meets jazz, jazz meets Americana, and the right players bring it all together. Produced byBADBADNOTGOOD, Rose and the band found an instant but seemingly endless well of inspiration; whatstarted as an introduction became a day, became a song, became a night, became Slow Burn.Baby Rose was already a powerful position player — she can share the stage withRobert Glasper without breaking a sweat, or close an epic film like Creed III, for which she performedthe closing credit song, with steely confidence. When Rose first met with BADBADNOTGOOD theidea was to say hello, get acquainted, see what a collaboration could, over time, potentially become.But the connection was instant, and together they put down lead single “One Last Dance” in just thatfirst meeting. It was Rose’s first freestyle vocal, and it snapped crucial pieces of her vision into focus.“I’ve known deep down there were new spaces and sounds that I could rise to,” Rose explains. “I’vealways been into different sounds that bring in those rawer textures.” And so while the speed of theircollaboration thrilled and surprised Rose, the potential and the end results did not. “We moved quickly,”she says, “and it really was a faucet. Once we got ‘One Last Dance’, it became clear everything was goingto flow.”The songs on Slow Burn were inspired in part by Rose’s experiences driving betweenher family’s home bases: the noise and chaos of DC and the quiet, Carolina countryside. Rose wouldcrank music and let her mind drift, making room for the internal monologues and imagined dialoguesyou might not otherwise dare to hear. There’s a dreaminess in those moments, and they smolder on SlowBurn: memories lose their realities, feelings replace happenings. Slow Burn’s title track, for example, setssoft, ambling drums against Rose’s lyrical repetitions, as she traces those recollections—some lives, somefelt— with patient, insistent desire.The standout “One Last Dance” arrives disguised as a love song, but is actually an ode to a lost friendship,and an imagined dream of one more day like the old days. Reality blurs with feeling again, vocals layerinto lullaby, and BADBADNOTGOOD’s bassist Chester Hansen brings that dreamlike quality to a sneaky,cautious but loving undertone. In fact most of the songs on Slow Burn have that stealthy, shadowed feel,like they’re arriving on tiptoe: intimate but a little dangerous, tender but a little mysterious.As complete and compelling a work as this is, Slow Burn points to a bigger, higherascent in Baby Rose’s future. “I feel boundless,” says Rose. “It’s one thing carrying the weight of theemotion I’m going to bring as a vocalist and lyricist, but now I feel like I’m the head on a body with allthese players and artists and other limbs. I’m in love with that process. When you have the right energyand the right synergy,” she says, “all that’s left is to trust yourself.