BATHS
Gut LP (out 2/21 via Basement's Basement)
Bio by Max Freedman
For his fourth full-length album Gut, Will Wiesenfeld–the acclaimed musician known as Baths–embraced a new personal ethos of writing “from the stomach” versus writing from the heart. “I think about men, and sex, quite literally all the time,” he says. “To make a new album that felt like an actual honest effort meant exploring this fact further than I’ve ever been comfortable with, with no regard to personal embarrassment or relatability.” Wildly and vibrantly unbridled, Gut is Wiesenfeld’s artful, intuitive brilliance on full display. “I’m sketching my strongest and most pervasive feelings out quickly and treating their roughness as gospel, then exploring them in greater detail with the added sheen of time and perspective,” he adds. “I ended up not just writing about sex but also about personal shortcomings, dreamless living, harmful fantasies, and dissonant self-identities…things I also think about all the time.”
Gut is the most direct Baths album to date. Longtime fans have often encountered themes of sex, romance, and all their offshoots in Wiesenfeld’s music—but they’ve never heard him quite like this. His lyrics are gloriously unvarnished, whereas the production is among his most carefully considered, and his vocal performances—whether he’s shouting, singing or whispering—match the brazen confidence of his writing. The most impressive Baths album of Wiesenfeld’s career, Gut spans a breathtaking spectrum of lacerating hopelessness to lustful joy.
Wiesenfeld started working on Gut before COVID-era lockdowns and finished it in April 2022. His songwriting process, after initially writing from the stomach, was to gradually “finesse it into a place that made more sense, but remained true to how raw the feeling was at first.” Each track is an almost entirely reactionary or physical thing. “Gut is essentially me trying to make my feelings make sense by not initially psychoanalyzing them—by instead just having feelings said and put on the table.”
The resultant stories indelibly and unsparingly reflect Wiesenfeld’s angst about—and, ultimately, acceptance of—“still having all-over-the-place sexual interactions with all-over-the-place men in all-over-the-place ways” in his 30s. He also explores how the weight of a perceived ‘ideal relationship,’ which has existed in his mind since childhood, has affected him. These threads intertwine on the exuberant lead single “Sea of Men,” in which Wiesenfeld sneers “Carnal is a normal mode (that’s that!) / Fucking all the men in droves (that’s that!)” over eerie yet jovial guitars that almost sound like harpsichords. Sure, it’s “base and boorish” (two of Wiesenfeld’s descriptors for Gut), but it’s also darkly humorous and honest in a way that builds a feeling of trust and familiarity with the listener. Alongside the bravado, Wiesenfeld manages to express a vulnerable and universal experience of aching for intimate partnership, yet struggling to progress from casual sex to something more.
“Sea of Men” is one of six Gut tracks which feature live drums (by Casey Dietz and Sam KS); it’s the greatest degree to which outside drummers have ever been involved in a Baths project. There’s a stronger emphasis on guitars, too (Wiesenfeld has played guitar for years in his other project, Geotic), and on eight songs, there are gorgeous strings arranged by Wiesenfeld, performed by longtime collaborators Isaura String Quartet, and engineered by Phil Hartunian at Tropico Beauty. The music is abrasive yet often ebullient, and some of its sound stems from his interest in noise-rock titans Gilla Band, brooding post-punk heroes Protomartyr, and dissonant experimental post-punk act A Frames—music that he describes as “really unforgiving in its presentation, where it hammers an idea into your brain so hard you can't forget it.”
Gut can be quite heavy at times—take the stunning seven-minute closer “The Sound of a Blooming Flower,” a song about unattainable affection and familial pain, which slowly builds from a crushing piano ballad to a discordant swirl of glitchy beats and guttural screams. Perhaps the album’s most brutal moment is “Governed,” which Wiesenfeld lovingly describes as “bummer central.” As a stuttering electronic beat spools out into a wall of smacking synths and desperate wails, he pleads not to be forgotten as those around him move into new life phases before he does. “I will die waiting, I will die governed / Some crucial move I never discovered / I will be quiet, I will be othered,” he whispers. Although it’s so candid you might feel like you’re eavesdropping, the engrossing sound design and crystal vocals keep you listening in.
Still, there’s plenty of euphoria among the sharp pain and self-criticisms of Gut to balance things out. “Eden” is a blissful highlight; maybe the first Baths song suited for a DJ set, the crowd might go wild for the chorus, where the slightly arrhythmic pianos and little digital bloops explode into a heavenly flurry, and Wiesenfeld soars into his highest register to evoke the exhilaration of bodily contact. It’s characteristically free of inhibitions, and one of the album’s boldest and best examples of his newfound “stomach music.” In writing from his gut, Wiesenfeld is the most himself he’s ever been.
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