The Q&A: Get to know Baba Ali
Baba Ali, the Anglo-American duo comprised of vocalist Baba Doherty and guitarist Nik Balchin, met while working in a London pub at the start of 2019. The pair bonded over their shared love of music, which they played in the boozer while on shift together, and later began drafting plans to begin crafting sounds of their own.
For the duo’s second album, Laugh Like A Bomb, they have taken on production duties for the first time and fused the guitar world with the club scene. These two musical environments, which don’t typically fit well together, combine delectably on the LP.
Since releasing their debut album, Memory Device, in 2021, the group has earned praise from their peers, having toured extensively with Yard Act and The Go! Team. Their first big break arrived when they caught the attention of The Kills’ Jamie Hince, who flew them out to Los Angeles to produce their debut EP, This House, which was a life-affirming experience for the pairing.
For their first album, Memory Device, Baba Ali worked under the tutorship of Hot Chip’s Al Doyle, who also performs live with LCD Soundsystem. After learning tricks of the trade from two of their inspirations, Doherty and Balchin felt they’d learnt enough to finally go alone with Laugh Like A Bomb, which perfectly captures the post-pandemic anarchy.
Over Zoom, Doherty discussed the duo’s journey from work colleagues at a pub in Whitechapel to working with Hince in Los Angeles and details their evolution while making Laugh Like A Bomb.
Q&A with Baba Ali:
Far Out: Explain the origins of Baba Ali…
Baba Doherty: “It was early 2019, and I had been living in London for a few years at the time. I was at art school, then working the night shifts at a bar in Whitechapel, and Nic was doing the same. The bar was very music orientated, and we were given the opportunity to choose the music, which is how the friendship started. He was very coy about saying he was a guitar player for a long time, but I eventually found out, and we slowly started to figure out how to make music together.
“Then our breakthrough was when we did the EP with Jamie Hince. Our manager asked who we should get to produce it, and off a whim, I said, ‘It’d be funny if we could get Jamie Hince from The Kills’ because there were so many things that I was inspired by from that band. Then we just went from there and realised how this is gonna work. And we’ve been just doing that ever since.”
What was the reaction to Jamie Hince agreeing to work with you?
“I was shocked because it was so out of the blue, and he doesn’t produce for a lot of people. We didn’t know what to expect even when we flew out to Los Angeles and were waiting for him in the studio, but he was just cool as shit, very sweet, encouraging and positive. When we first found out he was interested in working on it, it was just crazy that he was into what we were doing, and we still hit him up every now and then.”
How did you come to the decision to self-produce Laugh Like A Bomb?
“From the beginning, we wanted to go self-produced at some point and thought this was the right moment. Both Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem were on tour, so Al Doyle had a lot of space in his studio, and he was really nice about letting us go in there to work with the engineer, James Crump. It was really sick because it was this moment where we already had the chemistry of working together on Memory Device. It was just me, Nic and James in the studio, taking what we’ve experienced and learning from working with people and then trying to do it ourselves. Everything always felt like a discovery and something new.
“With Jamie, what was interesting was he was always interested in songwriting from the standpoint of frequencies. We needed to be hitting all the frequency levels, like the highs, the lows, and the mids. But with Al, he was always bringing his compositional arrangement and melody into our work. Songwriting is like a puzzle; you try to set up certain situations with a song and then get it over that finish line.”
What would you say is the overarching theme of the new album?
“It was a reflection of where I was at, personally. At that time, it was a weird situation because it was in the context of coming out of the pandemic, and it just felt like a very precarious time, and everyone felt like they were coming out of a cage. There were moments when I’d be in situations, witnessing people being really on edge and losing it.
“We came back to a world that was harder than before in a lot of ways. There wasn’t a lot of money in the industry, so many venues are still struggling, ticket sales are tough, and people don’t have money like before. I was feeling very kind of vulnerable because of coming out here and moving from America here. There’s a risk involved because of not having the same infrastructure to land on if shit doesn’t work out. So I was feeling vulnerable. It became therapeutic in that way, and maybe putting it into song helped take some of the load off of it.”
Let’s talk about the the album title…
“Laugh Like A Bomb is trying to explain this certain kind of manic energy because that’s what I always think about when I think about that phrase. It’s also quite an arresting phrase that conjures up this manic state of mind, which is kind of frenzied. You’re running at full speed, but then you’re maybe trying to laugh to keep from crying, which is like something some of my friends always say, they’re like, ‘We’re laughing to keep from crying.’ I guess there’s also a darkness to it, but I’m hoping the listener recognises what it means and connects with it.”
Laugh Like A Bomb is out now through Memphis Industries.