Over the past year, Australia’s Brannon Hughes – aka Lemonade Baby – has been ingratiating the IRL world into his alt-pop and indie-dance parallel universe with singles ‘would you be friends with me’, ‘my baby don’t forget’ and ‘Don’t Treat Me Like A Stranger’. Now the Brisbane creative is lifting up our spirits with the unpredictably nihilistic title ‘Is It Too Late’.
We say unpredictable because you’re probably not expecting such a song to launch you into disco-influenced funk groove. Even LB‘s falsetto admittance “I must admit / that I feel sick / to know that you can’t look in my eyes” is underpinned by an upbeat melody that swings straight back into those effectual tin taps and synth slaps. Hughes’ backstory for how ‘Is It Too Late’ came to be illuminates why this optimistic-pessimistic dichotomy is so apparent:
“This song started with a sample I was playing around with, whichI thought was pretty cool. I then added the drums and the baseline, and when I woke up 4 hours later I gave it a beat and a loose melody… but then life got in the way. I actually lost this song on my hard drive for close to a year and a half, but when I rediscovered it, I changed a few things and then started working on the lyrics, which took a long time for me to settle on. I found it hard to put into words how I was feeling at the time, but I did eventually get there.”
And so what began all those moons ago as a playful foray into production inspired by Prince, Cut Copy and Iggy Pop, later turned into something much deeper in which Lemonade Baby‘s vulnerability became a key piece of this unmissable release.
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