Obsidian came after a period of illness. Did this account for the darker sounds on the new album?
I had actually started work on Obsidian much earlier than Cerulean, the first album, but I set those ideas aside in order to make the first record something that was more digestible. I didn't want to make a dark pop album as my debut and for that to be people's first impression of me. I wanted it to be different. So the plan for Obsidian to be darker and have darker lyrics existed way before I got sick. I don't want people to think I set out to write about how much it sucks to be sick.
Before recording Obsidian, you researched the Black Death and Dante's Inferno. Pretty heavy reading material . . .
Ha, ha, yeah, I know. I don't know if it had an effect on me. I think the strangest thing was that I had expected harsher emotions like anger and sorrow to come through more, but apathy became the prevailing thing I wanted to try writing music about. I'm not an apathetic person, but it was a perspective that was interesting to me. .
Did the response to Cerulean surprise you?
Of course. I never expected any sort of success, I aim pretty low and I don't have too much of an ego. Looking back, Cerulean was simple and the songs happened quickly. Personally, I am much more down with this one at the moment because it took me so much longer and I had so much more invested in it. I spent so much time with the first one that I now think I'm over it.
Looking back to before Cerulean, do you ever get a hankering to go back and release some of those tracks?
All the stuff I did before Cerulean was just me working things out and figuring out what I was doing. I made so much bad stuff – I'm lucky that it wasn't the first thing by me to get introduced to the world. I had to take the time to find out and work out if something was good or just terrible and edit it out.
You live in Los Angeles, which has a pretty heathy beats scene thanks to Flying Lotus and the Brainfeeder crew. Did that influence your first album?
The album was really heavily focused on being beat-oriented, and on being something I could play out by myself, in the same way a lot of those guys do. So it was kind of built towards that idea, but it was never what I wanted to end up doing with music for the rest of my life, because that's not my thing. I suppose the new album was a conscious thing to not be a part of the beat scene or any scene. I think any artist only wants so much of that because any association immediately puts you into a category or a box.
Baths used to be a solo project but you've now got a live collaborator in Morgan Greenwood. How's that working out?
Great! It's been a very positive move. So many more possibilities open up because he's as talented as he is. We already have plans to work together in the studio too, which is something I've always done on my own.
You're with Anticon – how important for you is having a record label in your corner?
Anticon has been a wonderful home for me and a larger-scale release isn't something I could do on my own. I don't have the initiative, because I had tried to do that for five years prior to signing with them. There's no going back to that.
Baths plays The Button Factory, Dublin, on Wednesday, November 27th
