From the beginning, Will Wiesenfeld’s music as Baths has been characterized by a combination of tenderness and morbidity. On the first Baths album, that streak showed up on songs like “Lovely Bloodflow”, which made a connection between the idea of loving someone and the physical workings of the body. (The implicit message in referring to a lover as your “bloodflow” being the threat of what might happen if that love were to die.) Wiesenfeld’s interest in the body’s inner workings grew stronger on last year’s Obsidian, an album informed by the physical duress that came with fighting a virulent strain of bacteria.
On his new single, “Ocean Death”, Wiesenfeld is again grappling with mortality, though here he’s taking a broader view, using the sound of the ocean as a means to expand his scope. There’s a calm aspect to the track’s ceremonial loop that suggests a peaceful fading, and a short bridge composed of nothing but moving tides and a suddenly stalled heartbeat sound. Wiesenfeld has grown past his beat-scene beginnings, submerging his percussive quirks into a sturdy, overarching framework. But his falsetto gnaws as deeply as ever, and on “Ocean Death”, singing delightedly of a nighttime burial, he sounds rejuvenated and free from pain: Without straying from his pet subject, Baths has elevated a monomaniacal concern beyond himself, and into something metaphysical.