BABii Steps Into Her Own on DareDeviil2000
Taking some daring, unexpected risks on the project — the musician expresses that she has finally hit her sonic stride.
BABii, also known as Daisy Warne, has continually used her artistry as a sounding board for her deepest emotions and inner turmoils. She isn’t afraid to face her demons — as demonstrated through past projects MiiRROR and SCREAMER, which unfurl her inner workings atop British dance and hyperpop beats.
This time around, as BABii gears up for the release of her next project, DareDeviil2000, she is not only facing those demons head-on — but she steps into the psyches of the demons themselves. For BABii, not everything is what it seems. She enjoys looking at all things, in music, and in life, through different lenses. Coining this project as one of her most cohesive to date, she releases all inhibitions and steps into her power by exploring the dark corners of her mind that most tend to avoid.
Hypebae chatted with the genre-bending musician ahead of the project’s release and the release of its next single, “Scarface,” below.
Your upcoming third album is called DareDeviil2000. Would you consider yourself a daredevil? Do you often make unexpected, daring choices within your music?
Yes; I’m one of those people that’s overconfident — beyond reason sometimes. And I will always put myself in places that feel slightly scary. I’m very anti-comfort zone. I like to be a bit uncomfortable at all times or else it doesn’t feel right. So I’d say I’m a lowkey daredevil. I’m not doing any particularly crazy stuff, like trying to drive cars towards the edge of a cliff and then jump out of them or anything. I would also say that reflected in my music. I like to take risks and see what happens. Sometimes they don’t work and it sounds like garbage, but when they do work, it’s great.
That uncomfortable space is important because that’s when you end up creating something that challenges you in a good way. You’ve coined this as your most courageous era to date. Why is that? How did your past two albums prepare you for this one?
I think, like any musician, you start off slightly timid and hesitant to try out new things. You find a confidence as time progresses. So it’s only natural that I found myself at this point. I might go back on what I said before — I don’t know if I would actually say this is my most courageous era. I feel like I have been courageous since my album MiiRROR because that was quite a scary record to make. It was very personal and addressed a lot of emotions I had towards my mom. But I would say this is probably the era where I’ve worked the hardest. If I look at my aesthetics right now, it doesn’t look like anything anyone else is doing. Which is kind of scary because I didn’t know if people were going to appreciate that or not. But this project is very honest in terms of the references that I enjoy. It’s also very exposing to who I actually am, as a person, rather than making things in a way that aligns with how people would assume I am.
If some of those aesthetic elements were so easily replicated then it probably wouldn’t feel as authentic and personal to you. Sonically, do you think that this project departs from your others and shows a more evolved sound?
I definitely explored a lot of other genre references in this record than my other ones. A turning point for me was making my mixtape SCREAMER because I started to explore all of these UK dance music elements. That’s when I really found my sound. With this one, I’ve tried to expand on that and explore some of these more niche genres, like weightless Grime, which is this really weird, small flash of the Grime music that popped up in the UK. The other thing that’s different about this record is that I collaborated with a lot of people. Whereas on my past mixtape, I collaborated with some people, but it was all fragmented and there weren’t as many collaborators. So bringing all of these people together and curating the sound was quite fun. We were basically playing pass the parcel with laptops and mixing everyone’s vibes together.
On that note, tell us about some of the producers and collaborators you worked with on this project and what that creative process felt like.
I got really into collaborating on my last record and I’d never really done it before. I was adamant I needed to do everything myself, which was really fun, but it’s not a sustainable way of making music for me. I did do some of the songwriting by myself for this record. But then my dad passed away and I got really bad writer’s block. I didn’t really know what to do about it and I was a bit lost. Luckily, I was offered this residency in a studio in my hometown and it was big enough for a whole band. So it functioned as sort of a writing camp and I had the support of all of my best producer friends and we created this really nice environment. We would go into the studio all day, every day until the record was pretty much done. I don’t wanna make records in any other way now. It was so fun and it just felt like really like a really authentic way to collaborate with people. I don’t think I could have finished the record without them, to be honest.
It’s important to be able to even open up your mind to do that.
It’s hard to be a creative island. I think music, at the end of the day, is just curation. It’s just selecting loads of things that you like and bringing them together. So whatever way works for you is fine, but collaboration is what works for me.
DareDeviil2000 challenges binary notions of “good” and “bad” and just the general idea that life can be categorized in a black-and-white, distinct way. Why was that contemplative messaging the catalyst for many songs on the project?
I decided I was going to base it on the circles of hell before I even started writing the record. Obviously, hell comes along with the idea of sinners and bad people. At the time, I wasn’t really thinking about how that related to me personally. I just thought it’d be cool if I could play the villain from each of these circles of hell through the songs. It was through the process of writing it and exploring it that I started to discover how that connected to me personally. The record is actually just about my dad. I was addressing a lot of things about my past with him. He was a very complicated guy. He was one of those people that maybe others would assume he’s a bad guy, but he’s good at heart.
I wanted to explore the ways that people just sometimes assume someone is bad without thinking about the context. At the end of the day, everyone’s just doing the best they can with what they have. People are usually a result of their environment and having to survive systematic problems that they’ve found themselves in. I found it really important to explore hell but with some kind of air of empathy towards the bad guy. On each song, I’m singing from the perspective of the villain. I’m empathizing with them by trying to put myself in their shoes.
If you were a supervillain, what would be your powers and what would you call yourself?
Maybe I’d choose one of my own villains. That’s actually a hard question that I’ve never thought about before. I don’t know if I would be a supervillain. I don’t know if I would want to be.
A lot of times when we see supervillains portrayed, they’re just really misunderstood characters. And once you hear their backstories, they’re usually really sad. It makes us realize that there’s a reason why that person was hardened or turned into this ‘evil’ person. So looking through this perspective that you take on DareDeviil2000, it applies really well to real life. There are a lot of lessons people can take from that.
I find it quite interesting that newer movies and series’ really do delve into that part of the bad guy. When I was growing up, whenever you’d watch some movie and there’d be a bad guy, there was usually no explanation about why the bad guy was a bad guy. They’re just evil. But that sometimes reflects what happens in real life as well. People don’t take the time to understand other people. I think it’s really important to look at people who have opposite opinions or who may believe in very different things than you do and to try to understand why.
So you’d rather be the hero?
It’s funny. My dad used to say that I was his sidekick. And I kind of was his sidekick when I was a child, in some of the risky things that he used to do sometimes.
You said that this project delves into that relationship and I’m sure it was a therapeutic process for you. How do you find that you can use grief or confusion to fuel your artistry?
I feel like it’s quite a natural human thing to do, right? Because it’s a way of disassociating from something that’s actually kind of painful for you. So you can kind of process it through symbols and metaphors instead. I think all art is just processing something, whether that’s the mundane or the exciting.
Starting this project, you were conceptualizing songs, and, at first, you said it didn’t really feel like it was about you. And then you got deeper into the process and you realized, subliminally, it was. Can you separate the art from the artist? Do you think it’s possible or do you think there’s always a piece of you that’s inserted into the work?
There’s always a piece of you. I think it’s really hard to make things from your own subconscious and from your own experiences that don’t directly connect to you. It’s always going to be about you, even if you try not to make it about you. But, you know, people always talk about separating the art from the artist when someone gets canceled [laughs]. I think that becomes really complicated. But just because someone’s been canceled doesn’t mean that their art is bad. I guess it just kind of taints it, in a way. I think that people should be allowed to have some kind of redemption. And there are some exceptions to that rule. But it’s a really complicated question, isn’t it? On a surface level, I believe art is always connected to the artist. And on a deeper level that people don’t even realize.
The album superimposes electronic, pop, and even Detroit cybercrime scam rap sounds. What music do you listen to between listening to and creating your own?
It’s hard to explain but when I’m making a record, I’ll make a playlist of songs that have a certain feeling, and a lot of the time they won’t be of the same genre. It’s just all of these amalgamations of this vibe that I can’t really explain in words, which is why I have to make things, I guess. Playing upon this project’s theme, this one has a scary sound design that’s kind of hard-hitting and then really minimal at other points. And there were influences from the collaborators I was working with too. There were definitely some moments that I wasn’t expecting to appear on the album, like these kinds of R&B-sounding songs, or I also didn’t expect to have a little Jersey club moment. But you get inside the studio and things just take on a life of their own.
Leading up to the album release, you’re really focusing on world-building. Your database website is currently revealing monsters from different layers of hell, inspired by your singles. What do these monsters or villain figures represent?
Some of them are quite personally connected to me. The Scarface villain is literally just a representation of my dad. He used to be an ice hockey player when he was younger. He was about to get picked up by the NHL, but he didn’t want that life. So that’s an easy one. There’s a song called “XL Bully,” which is based on a very British stereotype. It’s these kinds of football hooligan-type guys that go to certain pubs and love to fight. I have a song called “Club & Fang,” which is based on my dad’s favorite book, Call of the Wild. That character is the dog from the book, called Buck, but my villain is a werewolf version. I named one of them Murray Brennan, who is after my dad’s best friend he always used to talk about but we never knew him. He’s just some guy that was in stories all the time. And the rest of them, I’d say, are mostly metaphors.
What element of this project are you most excited for people to hear or see and what are you most proud of?
I’m just excited about the whole album coming out because then all of the stories and everything will be revealed. I’m excited to find that story’s ending as well because I don’t know what that is myself right now. So I’m kind of on the same journey as everyone else. I’m figuring it out as I’m going along. And I’m doing a big exhibition for when the album comes out, in London. There are going to be listening stations where you can listen to the songs and look at all the different characters and their stories. This is the first time I’ve been able to execute that worldbuilding element and for it to be really easily translatable is what I’m most proud of. I finally figured it out.
BABii’s album, DareDeviil2000, will be released on October 11th.
