Bio

On the surface, Bathe’s radiant R&B is as inviting as the waves lapping the shoreline at a five-star tropical resort. But listen closer, and there are shadowy depths within. 

Singer-songwriter Devin Hobdy and guitarist-producer Corey Smith-West, who formed Bathe eight years ago while attending the University of Pennsylvania, make music that sounds like a balm for the anxieties of modern life. This flowing sense of ease contributed to their 2021 debut album Bicoastal drawing in more than 30 millions streams on Spotify. Amid that record’s unhurried grooves, though, were pangs of yearning and desperation that complicated Bathe’s placement in so many chill vibes playlists.

The Brooklyn duo’s follow-up LP, Inside Voice(s)—which will be released in two parts, with Side A arriving September 13, 2024 and Side B out in early 2025—doubles down on this beguiling contrast. Serene chords, luxurious beats, and infinitely hummable melodies soundtrack songs about familial grief, numbing millennial angst, and the cyclical despair of underserved communities. Featuring vocal production from Jake Aron (L’Rain, Snail Mail), mixing by Joe Visciano (SZA, Kendrick Lamar), and mastering by Joe LaPorta (David Bowie, Beach House), Inside Voice(s) follows in the lineage of albums like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange in being both lush and sorrowful—a plea to the present filled with ghosts of the past, emerging in an era when the future seems anything but certain. 

“Most of the songs on this album deal in that dissonance of being split between two places—where you are and where you want to be,” explains Smith-West. Running with the thought, Hobdy adds, “It’s about the idea that you might not ever get to the place you want to be, that you might feel that longing for the rest of your life, and that’s as OK as it can be.”

Underlining this split between reality and fantasy, the title of first single “Avalon” refers to both the sensible Toyota sedan and the mythical island paradise. Atop dreamy guitars and a boom-bap beat, Hobdy sings of being listless and unemployed—“out of shape in a rat race with no rules”—before letting his mind wander to more idyllic locales. Listening to the song is like standing in a crowded subway car en route to another longshot job interview as you stare at an ad for a faraway beach; its smoothness is a mirage in itself. For both Hobdy and Smith-West, two millennials entering their 30s who have already endured several corporate layoff cycles, songs like “Avalon” and the similarly disillusioned track “Furloughed” are all-too-relatable slices of life for a generation that’s never known stability, that can only escape by staring at a screen.

Throughout Inside Voice(s), family members are evoked in tribute and remembrance as they guide Bathe through doubt spiritually and musically. As the duo worked to write and record the album over the last few years, Hobdy moved back into his mom’s house to help take care of his ailing grandmother. The album’s hushed closing ballad “Bbyboy” finds Hobdy empathizing with his grandma, who passed away last year, with aching lines like, “Your hands are unfamiliar to you/Time moved, your memories forgot about you.” Smith-West also lost a grandmother recently, and she is immortalized via a voicemail that appears on “Hosannas,” a heavenly caress of a song about the inner turmoil that comes with losing your religion. Meanwhile, the legacy of Smith-West’s grandfather, a reggae guitarist, is heard through his grandson’s playing and production, especially on the psychedelic dub odyssey “Heaven.” And the influence of Hobdy’s mother, who studied jazz and took her son along with her to nightclub gigs in his youth, is felt in his searching vocal lines and pillowy harmonies. Talking about his exacting mom, Hobdy admits with a smile, “She still gives me notes after every show.”

The album’s two halves are a reflection of the differences between Hobdy and Smith-West as people and artists. Smith-West, who grew up in the Connecticut suburbs, tends to gravitate toward sounds that are brighter and bouncier; Hobdy, who came of age in Jamaica, Queens, usually ends up with something darker and moodier when he sits down to write a song. On Inside Voice(s), Side A is warmer and fuzzier, a more complex and rewarding extension of the styles Bathe explored on Bicoastal; Side B is spare and pained, dotted with exploratory flourishes—blown-out outros, featherlight dance beats, dancehall loops—that hint at the myriad directions the duo could go next. 

After the success of their first album, Bathe came to understand what tens of millions of streams can and can’t do for an artist, both creatively and financially, in today’s music landscape. It gave them confidence to trust their instincts as songwriters. It served as a beacon for like-minded collaborators, who helped them achieve the sound they were striving for. It offered some welcomed financial latitude—though not nearly as much as their friends and family thought it would bring. “Our heads can’t get too big because there’s a reality check around every corner,” Hobdy says. Inside Voice(s) is all about those moments when the real world intrudes on our best laid plans, when our inner monologues chafe against the image that’s present to the outside world. Its waters are welcoming, just don’t forget about the undertow.