After recently announcing their debut album Lately, Love Is Dead is out July 10, Australia-born, Berlin-based Baby Smith, made up of Ray Sonder and Saxon Gable, share their new single ‘Limoncello River’. The band have also announced a run of European tour dates for September including UK shows in Bristol, London, Glasgow and Newcastle.

On the new single, Baby Smith said “Lyrically, we were playing with an idea of creating an oddity in the feeling of the song. We wanted things to be not quite sitting right, almost being nonsensical. We wanted to create a sense of friction by mixing the mundane with something more surreal. It was partly inspired by one of our closest friends going through a really intense period, dealing with serious health issues whilst also becoming a father. It felt like the best of times and the worst of times colliding. We kept coming back to this paradox and wanted to create a bit of a dizzying emotion in the lyrics. We ended up in a whimsical, off-kilter place with the song. Lines like “On time waiting round for hours” or “Cemetery winters, doctors singing seaside blues” give us this weird almost disorientating feeling as if something is a bit off. There are little encoded messages in the lyrics that are a nod to things from our lives that we thought would be cool to throw in, kinda secrets in plain sight.

“We’ve been playing this one live for a while now and we have been getting a really nice response from it. The ending in particular is a lot of fun for us to play. We really wanted to capture this big coda on record, but with so many ideas and melodies, finding the right balance was a challenge. We ended up weaving different motifs in and out, which took some work to get right without overdoing it. We ended up packed in as much as we could and even brought in some friends to add strings, flute, and tuba which was a fun to record.”