Baths

Baths, the acclaimed LA-based artist/producer Will Wiesenfeld, today announced his first album in seven years, Gut, will be released on February 21st, 2025 via Basement’s Basement. The album’s exuberant lead single “Sea of Men,” which arrives alongside a self-directed video and premiered today via PAPER, is the perfect entry point into the world of Gut. A darkly humorous and honest track that expresses bravado and deep vulnerability at once, Wiesenfeld sings bluntly about his relationship with sex, over eerie yet jovial guitars that almost sound like harpsichords. “I find myself thinking about how confusingly animal I often feel—present in body but dissociative in spirit. Instinctual,” he explains. “An entire life where appetite comes first and ‘carnal is a normal mode,’ leaving little room to discover anything new about myself while constantly scavenging for the next gratification." “Sea of Men” is one of six LP tracks which feature live drums (by Casey Dietz and Sam KS); it’s the greatest degree to which outside drummers have ever been involved in a Baths project to date. Gut is now available for pre-order HERE.

Wiesenfeld’s self-produced, fourth full-length embraces a personal ethos of writing “from the stomach” versus writing from the heart. “I think about men, and sex, quite literally all the time,” he says. “To make a new album that felt like an actual honest effort meant exploring this fact further than I’ve ever been comfortable with, with no regard to personal embarrassment or relatability.” Wildly and vibrantly unbridled, Gut is Wiesenfeld’s artful, intuitive brilliance on full display. “I’m sketching my strongest and most pervasive feelings out quickly and treating their roughness as gospel, then exploring them in greater detail with the added sheen of time and perspective,” he adds. “I ended up not just writing about sex but also about personal shortcomings, dreamless living, harmful fantasies, and dissonant self-identities…things I also think about all the time.”

Gut is the most direct Baths LP to date. Longtime fans have often encountered themes of sex, romance, and all their offshoots in Wiesenfeld’s music—but they’ve never heard him quite like this. His lyrics are gloriously unvarnished, whereas the production is among his most carefully considered, and his vocal performances—whether he’s shouting, singing or whispering—match the brazen confidence of his writing. The most impressive record in Wiesenfeld’s career—which has also included soundtrack work for the beloved animated Netflix show Bee and PuppyCat as well as countless high profile collaborations and remixes (for Grizzly Bear, Flying Lotus, Imogen Heap, ODESZA, and many more)—Gut spans a breathtaking spectrum of lacerating hopelessness to lustful joy.

Wiesenfeld started working on Gut before COVID-era lockdowns and finished it in April 2022. His songwriting process, after initially writing from the stomach, was to gradually “finesse it into a place that made more sense, but remained true to how raw the feeling was at first.” Each track is an almost entirely reactionary or physical thing. “Gut is essentially me trying to make my feelings make sense by not initially psychoanalyzing them—by instead just having feelings said and put on the table.” There’s a stronger emphasis on guitars, too (Wiesenfeld has played guitar for years in his other project, Geotic), and on eight songs, there are gorgeous strings arranged by Wiesenfeld, performed by longtime collaborators Isaura String Quartet, and engineered by Phil Hartunian at Tropico Beauty. The music is abrasive yet often ebullient, and some of its sound stems from his interest in noise-rock titans Gilla Band, brooding post-punk heroes Protomartyr, and dissonant experimental post-punk act A Frames—music that he describes as “really unforgiving in its presentation, where it hammers an idea into your brain so hard you can't forget it.”

In writing from his gut, Wiesenfeld is the most himself he’s ever been.