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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.

2 years ago I made a documentary with FOREVER FILMS about growing up around West London free party culture – in light of official #NottingHillCarnival being cancelled we decided to put it out to the world@NOWNESS just put it as their pick of the week https://t.co/8NSSLDmqdT pic.twitter.com/jQ33Y0ez4O

— LAVA LA RUE (@lavalarue) August 28, 2020

In the video, Lava La Rue talks about the DIY rave culture in West London in the 90s. The Windrush movement that started in the 1950s brought an influx of Caribbean people to Notting Hill and Portobello.  At this time, ‘Caribbean people weren’t welcome in the clubs‘ so ‘had to move the party elsewhere‘. Elsewhere was the ‘crumbling West London terraces‘ that now cost around £4 million. At these ‘blues parties‘, Stranger Cole and Patsy Todd would blast out of the sound-system.

In West Born, La Rue tells us her parents arrived in England in the 1990s. Gone were the ‘blues parties‘ and in their place was an evolving rave scene based on a DIY community ethos. Lava La Rue talks about these days fondly, though she experienced them through the lens of childhood. ‘I was around sound-systems and thumping booming music from a very young age… [I was] the little kid running around barefoot while everyones on a trippy one‘.

It was an unorthodox childhood, but one she enjoyed thoroughly. So much so that she wanted to start putting on similar parties in her teens, desiring to ‘curate a space‘ that felt safe and shared the community values of the ones her parents went to.

In the documentary, she and musician Louis Culture discuss East v. West in terms of nightlife. Louis contends that East is ‘kind of winning’ at the moment, and Lava agrees ‘there’s been an attack on the arts in West… for some reason securing a venue in West is difficult to obtain… it’s the prices, they’ve not made it accessible to locals.’

Toward the end of the video, Lava La Rue stands on Tavistock Road talking listening intently to Leslie Palmer, Trinidadian community activist and one of the pioneers of Notting Hill Carnival back in the mid 1960s. Palmer’s vision was that people from different Afro-Caribbean communities would come together to make Carnival bigger and better. This was certainly achieved as Carnival is now a festival of  thousands from all different cultures.

Lava La Rue holds Carnival close to her heart, saying in Vogue that her first carnival was ‘in the womb‘. This intimate connection makes her documentary both authentic and inspiring to watch.