Daughter’s seven year hiatus has come to an end.

Eerie and elegiac, @ohdaughter seep into the modern day rock canon with a fascinating unworldliness, continuing to evolve on ‘Stereo Mind Game’.

Our April Album of the Month.@4AD_Official https://t.co/wZDEYDUcM1 pic.twitter.com/BZmqKR9PaJ

— Rough Trade (@RoughTrade) April 11, 2023

Bittersweet longing colours the 12-track album with lead singer Elena Tonra’s soft anxious vocals layered delicately over melancholic post-rock guitar riffs. The spacey album has received critical acclaim from NME, Pitchfork, Far Out Magazine, and the Guardian.

To celebrate the album’s launch, record stores around the world held listening parties for the public to get a sneaky preview of the record the day before its release. A pop-up shop also opened on Quaker Street in London selling Daughter merch on the album’s release day. The band debuted songs from the album live during their at Rough Trade East on Brick Lane, London on the same evening.

Pastel film kaleidoscopes together in the three music videos released for “Party”, “Swim Back”, and “Be Your Own Way”.

Watch the video for “Swim Back” below:

Daughter is comprised of North London singer Elena Tonra, Swiss guitarist Igor Haefeli and French drummer Remi Aguilella. The trio formed in 2010, after Haefeli attended one of Tonra’s acoustic shows in London. Their debut album, 2013’s If You Leave, received positive reviews from critics and charted at number 16 on the UK album charts. Some of the lyrics deal with Tonra and Haefeli’s break up, which happened shortly before the album’s release.

Stereo Mind Games is the band’s first studio album in seven years and follows on from 2016’s Not to Disappear. Daughter released one soundtrack in 2017, Music From Before the Storm, the soundtrack for the video game Life Is Strange: Before the Storm. The album is 13 tracks and is largely compromised of instrumentals.

After Music From Before the Storm, the band announced a temporary hiatus with Elena telling Guitar Magazine: “We decided to have a little break, because we realised that we’d been together and working together for about eight years, so we decided it would be nice – in a friendly way! – to spend some time apart”.

During this time, Elena released her debut solo album Ex:Re (2019). The album explores Elena’s fresh heartbreak. She further explained to Guitar Magazine the decision to work on the project solo: “All the Daughter songs are personal but it just felt like another level. I was like no, this is too much, this is like handing Igor and Remi my personal diary and being like, ‘Have a flick through guys! Let me know if there’s any good stuff!’”.

At the moment, the band has yet to confirm any plans to tour in support of Stereo Mind Game.

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We can’t wait to share the album with you on the 20th of November! Here is the final artwork by the amazing @rivercousin Keep on listening to Craziest Things it’s a banger link up top

A post shared by babeheaven (@babeheavenband) on Oct 6, 2020 at 3:31am PDT

The track opens with a velvety bass line underpinning a reverberating electric guitar. A steady drum-beat soon enters alongside Nancy Andersen’s angelic voice singing: ‘I have been losing sleep// My minds on the craziest things// I lie in bed, trying not to think// but my heads on the ceiling.’ 

Front-woman Andersen says that the song is about ‘[her] anxiety and insomnia, not being able to make sense of [her] emotions and mania’. This can be felt in those opening lyrics, which beautifully depict the all too relatable feeling of racing thoughts before sleep.

As the song continues, the echoing chorus ‘I’m sorry I’m climbing up the walls// I couldn’t lay their anymore…’ gets more insistent. There is a continuous motif running through the track, which sounds like a harp but is in fact a detuned ukulele, giving it a dreaminess typical of Babeheaven’s music.

The fluorescent-hued video, directed by award-winning animator Sacha Beeley, is a playful and surreal depiction of sleepless anxiety. The trippy visuals of dripping taps and floating hearts on the ceiling mirror the ‘Craziest thoughts’ that Anderson describes.

Jamie Travis and Nancy Andersen, the band’s main members, have known each other since they were about 13. They used to go back to one of their houses after finishing their day jobs and ‘mess about recording songs’. This friendly intimacy permeates Babeheaven’s music.

In 2016 Nancy spoke to FADER about the band’s debut video for Heaven, explaining that she and Jamie both grew up ‘in an area knowing everybody… all our siblings are friends, and our parents are friends too’. The video ‘shows [them] in [their] natural habitat’ of West London streets and bedrooms.

A personal warmth runs through all of Babeheaven’s music as a result of this. Tracks like November and It’s Not Easy feel like they come straight from the pages of Andersen’s diary. The latter is a misty ode to guitarist Jamie in which Andersen sings: ‘I am glad you made me go and perform…my legs were shaking throughout// Jamie it’s not easy but you play so beautifully.’

Talking about Craziest Things, she speaks about her anxiety toward performing, stating: ‘As a person of colour and a plus-size woman, I’ve never felt that comfortable with myself as a performer’. Over lockdown she has worked on remembering that she ‘is on that stage for a reason, particularly as a person of colour.’ There is no doubt that Nancy and the band truly deserve their place on the stage.