If you need the soundtrack to a meandering afternoon car ride, look no further than the languid songs of Brooklyn-based surf R&B duo Bathe. Band members Corey Smith-West and Devin Hobdy met in an acappella group at the University of Pennsylvania and officially began making music together in the summer of 2015. Their band’s moniker, they explain (beaming at me from a Zoom call) was inspired by a music critic’s impassioned band review. “[It] said something like, ‘…and when I turned the music on, I felt as though I was bathing in light,’” Smith-West recalls. “We settled on the name Bathe in tribute to that feeling.”
It’s a perfect metaphor. Their music is ethereal and soothing, but full of nostalgia and yearning, and it haunts listeners long after the last note. I sat down with Bathe to talk about the creation of surf R&B, writing lyrically about violence in the Black community, and a life-changing convo with Childish Gambino.
Karisma Price: How did you find Bathe’s sound? And how do you define “surf R&B”?
Corey Smith-West: To me, surf R&B is surf and beach music that’s made with Black folks top-of-mind, that makes space for being unapologetically Black. Whenever my family would go on vacation, we’d go somewhere with a body of water. A lot of my happiest childhood memories are near large bodies of water, and whenever I was at the beach, I was listening to The Beach Boys, or Spectrals, or Girls, or super surfy bands. But I didn’t really see myself in [them]; there just wasn’t a lot of beach music for Black folks. So surf R&B was like a mission statement to discover and paint that world.
Devin Hobdy: As an artist, people expect you to have an intimate relationship with your inner voice. You have to really respect it and listen to it more attentively than other people do, maybe. But I think that our sound is kind of the result of having occasional license to not listen to that voice, to let someone else’s voice guide you, should you need guidance. Our entire creative development has been us taking turns steering and guiding each other.
KP: There’s so much longing that comes across in maybe every song on your latest album, Bicoastal. It’s a sense of distance, steeped in multiple forms of love—some of it romantic love, but not all.
DH: Particularly with R&B, there’s an expectation that all your music is going to be about romantic love in all of its different phases, and that can be really beautiful, right? But as songwriters, sometimes that can get boring. We wanted to explore those feelings of distance in familial love and platonic love; those are really important to us. Those forms of love often don’t get representation in R&B.
KP: Dev, your voice reminds me of a jazzier version of Childish Gambino. I love your falsetto.
CS-W: [Laughs] Oh, that’s super funny. I don’t think we’ve told this story before, but Childish Gambino is pretty integral to the start of this band because we got the chance to meet him super early on. It might’ve been within a couple months of us starting Bathe or a couple months before. We talked to him for a good 30 to 40 minutes about what it means to be a Black creative, and how to make art that speaks to you that you can also present to other people. At the end of the conversation, he was like, “Yeah, you guys got this, man. I believe in y’all, y’all going to do it.” And we looked at each other like, Aw, shit. Childish Gambino said we have to be good at this, so now we actually have to be good at this.
KP: You mentioned in previous interviews that your single “Sure Shot” (from your EP I’ll Miss You) is about the paranoia and anxiety Black men experience having to be ready to use violence or have violence enacted upon them. What was it like translating those feelings into lyrics?
DH: We were trying less to narrate or dictate a story to you [than] to embody these lived experiences that people in our lives have gone through.
CS-W: I also think we were super inspired. I have a lot of uncles who have suffered [with] the prison industrial complex and over-policing in different ways. It shaped how they navigate the world and how they brought up my generation. So we were trying to speak to and do justice to everyone’s experience of that, not just from our perspective but from theirs as well. It’s first-person narration, but it’s the amalgamation of a bunch of different experiences.
KP: The “Sure Shot” music video shows a group of young, brown boys playing basketball, and then suddenly they’re pretending to shoot each other. Eventually, they all play dead. How did you come up with that concept?
CS-W: The song is super repetitious, and it alludes to this cycle—whether it’s a cycle of violence or a transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next. Like, people repeat the patterns the people before them lived through, even if those people tried to do everything they could to help that younger generation steer clear of it. The kids [in the video] are like that—almost a fresh slate, but they’re playing games that they’ve learned from the world and from other people. So at the end, when they’re playing cops and robbers and acting out getting shot, for a young Black kid, it’s no different from learning to play basketball: You learn that you’re at risk. It’s almost like you never have the opportunity to be a blank slate, really. ❤
STORY CREDITS
PHOTOGRAPHY Matt Munson, STYLIST Jamie Ortega GROOMER, Toby Klinger
CLOTHING CREDITS
ON COREY: SHIRT Wales Bonner, PANTS Alex Mill, Corey’s own shoes
ON DEVIN: SHIRT Bode, T-SHIRT Alex Mill, PANTS Jacquemus,
Devin’s own glasses, earring, socks, and shoes.
Read more stories
