Baby Queen Takes on Anxiety and Mental Health

Baby Queen (South African-raised singer-songwriter Bella Latham) burst on the scene with her debut single “Internet Religion,” a piece of sharp pop satire. As Baby Queen, 23-year-old Latham tries to cope with the anxiety she experienced after she moved to London and tried to fit into the city, where she was pulled into fashion parties and Instagram influencers. 

Exposure to a world of fake personalities and self-obsession brought her back to music, her first passion, and she felt compelled to write songs about her experiences. 

“I started to write bitterly about the world that I had perceived whilst being here in London, and the way that it had changed me, and the narcissist I had become,” she says in a press release about her new single, the trip-hop-inspired anti-anthem “Medicine.”

I got obsessed with these identities that we cultivate online; the front stage self and the backstage self, who you actually are and who you pretend to be.

“Medicine” represents her third single for Polydor Records. A press release boasts the song is “a bittersweet earworm that digs into her relationship with anti-depressants and hints at the diaristic intimacy of her songwriting. Baby Queen will release a new EP later this year. 

“It’s about a tangle of mental health and navigating your way through this world,” Latham says of the song in a press release, “whilst being so unhappy and equally disillusioned with the cyber landscape that we are forced to live inside, and the different ways people might numb themselves, or try to find a place where they can exist in amongst all of this fucking chaos.”

“Medicine” is the follow up to acclaimed single “Buzzkill,” which found BBC Radio 1 hailing her as one of its “new names” on The Annie Mac Show. 

Inspired by acts such as Little Simz, Kate Tempest and Matty Healy of the 1975, Baby Queen plays guitar, bass, piano/keys, ukulele, banjo and even drums.

“I realized that I love dark, complex lyrics over a really happy-go-lucky chord progression,” she says of her sound.

While pop was always her foundation, she says her new music came out sounding more like “soft grunge, not clean pop – there’s nothing clean about it at all.”