Baby Scream

Sometimes the best records are the ones that were never supposed to happen. There is something wonderfully chaotic about Limbo, the new album from Baby Scream. Juan Pablo Mazzola apparently had no grand plan to unleash it on the world. The songs were written between 2022 and 2023, the original idea was an intimate acoustic record, and the whole thing could quite easily have remained another one of those albums that sits on a hard drive gathering digital dust.

Then Eze Gruber got involved. What started with Gruber adding keyboards gradually turned into something considerably bigger, stranger and far more interesting. Suddenly the acoustic sketches were being pulled apart, rebuilt and covered in layers of synths, bass, keyboards, backing vocals and production, transforming Limbo from what might have been a stripped-back companion to 2022's Castell de Pop into an eleven-track trip through Power Pop, New Wave, psychedelic pop and classic rock territory.

And thank fuck it didn't stay on that hard drive. Limbo is an album with a wonderfully restless personality. It doesn't sit comfortably inside one genre and doesn't seem particularly interested in trying. “Parole” sets the tone with its existential unease, while “Smoke and Mirrors” digs deeper into the album's darker, more surreal territory. “Lullaby” turns introspection into something considerably less comforting than its title suggests, before “Puppets” and “21st Century Bullshit” kick open the door and let the lunacy properly inside.

That eclecticism is one of the album's greatest strengths. Rather than sounding like a collection of unrelated experiments, the songs are held together by Mazzola's distinctive songwriting and a persistent sense that something is slightly askew. The melodies can be deceptively accessible, but underneath them is a lyrical world populated by isolation, displacement, ageing, politics, love, absurdity and the occasional glimpse into the abyss.

The title Limbo suddenly makes perfect sense.

Both Mazzola and Gruber have spent years living away from their native Argentina, and that feeling of existing somewhere between places, identities and versions of yourself hangs over the record. It gives the album an existential edge without turning it into a miserable exercise in staring at your shoes. There is humour here, too, and plenty of surrealism. “21st Century Bullshit” takes a flamethrower to modern absurdity, while “The Jester” heads straight for the circus, with Mazzola firing lyrical arrows at egos, power and self-important bullshit.

Then there is “H”, perhaps one of the clearest expressions of that sense of displacement, with its repeated feeling of being far away and unable to quite find home. It is a recurring emotional thread throughout Limbo: being somewhere, but not necessarily belonging there.

The Gruber factor is crucial. His role expanded from keyboard player to producer, mixer and multi-instrumentalist, and that evolution is effectively the story of the album itself. He plays keyboards, synths, bass and backing vocals, recorded the production in Valencia and helped turn Mazzola's original acoustic concept into something considerably more adventurous.

There is also a nice Valencia connection running through the record. Limbo was recorded at Studio 4 in Valencia, produced and mastered by Gruber at NPI estudio, and the collaboration follows the pair's 2023 live recording at Loco Club. So while Baby Scream may have begun life in Buenos Aires, Limbo is very much part of the musical conversation happening from this side of the Mediterranean.

What makes the whole thing even more appealing is Mazzola's complete lack of interest in pretending that Limbo arrived according to some perfectly executed career strategy. It didn't. The album sat around for years. It was finished more than three years before finally being released. It was never really supposed to see daylight.

Now it does. And rather than apologising for its oddness, Limbo embraces it. There is a refreshing freedom in that. This isn't a record desperately trying to fit a playlist, chase a trend or tick whatever promotional boxes the modern music industry has decided musicians should tick this week. It sounds like two musicians following the songs wherever they wanted to go, occasionally taking a wrong turn and deciding that the wrong turn sounded better.

That is where Limbo finds its charm. It is melodic without being predictable, eclectic without becoming completely unhinged, introspective without disappearing up its own arse. At its best, it sounds like the result of two musicians throwing different pieces of their musical history into the same room and seeing what survived.

The answer is eleven songs that probably shouldn't work as well as they do.

But they fucking do. Limbo may have spent three years waiting for its moment, but Baby Scream and Eze Gruber have finally dragged it out of the shadows. And sometimes the records that arrive without a master plan are the ones worth paying the closest attention to.

Check it out here: Bandcamp