For Siobhan Lynch, music has always been in her life. “I was one of those typical, ‘Came out of the womb singing’ kind of thing,” she tells Post-Burnout when we spoke. Growing up in a musical household and influenced by her late grandfather, who was once a member of The Dubliners, she would later join the Dublin Gospel Choir, where she would meet the members of her first band, the indie-pop group Champagne Animal, that existed on the Dublin music scene throughout the early 2010s. As that project was going, she enrolled in the then-fledgling BIMM Institute in 2012 (which had only opened its Dublin branch the previous year) to study Vocals and Songwriting.

“[Champaign Animal] kind of wrapped up, I think, in 2014, maybe,” Siobhan says. “Then I just had a few years of working a full-time retail job, and I started to get really, really down. I was like, ‘There’s something missing. There’s something not right.’ I had stopped with the Gospel Choir at that stage, as well, so I had no music in my life, really.

“So, I just started writing again, and then very slowly…Like, I released a song in 2015, then in 2016, and then maybe one in 2018. Then I decided…around the pandemic time, I think, we were all like, ‘God, what is life?!’ [Laughs] I just thought, ‘I’m going to go for this.’

“I didn’t really have a plan, but I had been listening to Enda Gallery, who I write with and who produces the tracks. I had been listening to his songs and some of his artists, like Strange Boy and Tolü Makay, and loved them. So, just on the off-chance… – I was like, ‘Look, nothing might come of this’ – …I just emailed him and said, ‘Look, any chance you might want to do a bit of writing?’

“So, he actually emailed me back and he was like, ‘Look, I can’t. You know, I’m kind of chock-a-block. But do you want to jump on a call and we’ll have a chat?’, and I think we instantly clicked. We just got on really well. And he emailed me and he was like, ‘I’m going to make space for you!’ So, that’s how this project came about.”

The project Siobhan refers to is, of course, Baba, which has gained a lot of attention recently through a combination of Siobhan’s unapologetically sincere lyrics and the blending of electro-pop beats and traditional instrumentation that complement those lyrics.

“So, how we write is in two ways,” Siobhan says of her and Enda’s collaborative process. “Either I will have a melody, idea and lyrics on the Voice Memos on my phone and I’ll bring it to Enda and we’ll work with it, but actually, what happened a lot of the time was that we’d just sit down at the piano and Enda would just start messing around.

“I can play a little bit of piano, really badly, and I play violin, really badly. But Enda, he’s just a wonder man, instrumental-wise. So, he’d always play something really beautiful on the piano, and then we’d work from there. So, that’s how most of the songs were written; they all started with just piano and vocals.”

In 2018, the Baba project released its first single, “I Defy,” which gained traction due to its inclusion on Universal Production Music UK’s 100% HER compilation in 2020 and later being picked up by the British television network Film4 for an advertisement for their upcoming summer schedule. This was followed by their second single, “Keep You Safe,” in 2021.

After these successes, Siobhan was happy to continue releasing singles for the foreseeable future, but Enda pushed her towards making a full-length release. Initially, Siobhan was ambivalent about recording an album, citing some reluctance from friends who had told her that they no longer listen to entire records. What convinced her to do it was that she had a story to tell.

“The story is, I was pregnant with a little boy in January 2023, and we very sadly lost him halfway through the second trimester of the pregnancy,” Siobhan explains. “And it was very important to me to tell his story because a lot of women, or a lot of families, but especially women, are told to keep miscarriages and things like that to ‘Deal with yourself in private. It’s not for anybody else.’

“But I just thought that it was really, really important for me to talk about it and talk about the process of what happened, and also to talk about how I’ve been dealing with that for the last few years. There’s no point in me hiding away from that. One of the things is with Apollo, I have a little girl now, which is amazing, but we talk about Apollo all the time, what he might have looked like, and I don’t ever want him to be forgotten.”

After agreeing to make an album, the process of crafting it was a little tricky. “So, I wasn’t in the country for loads of it,” Siobhan says. “So, basically, the backstory was, we said, ‘Look, we’ll release a few songs and we’ll see how we go,’ and very soon into it, Enda just said, ‘Look, do you want to just do an album, a collection of songs?’ I had that tendency to release one a year and sit back, and Enda was like, ‘I think we should go for this and write an album.’

“So, the plan was to kind of write twenty-five or thirty songs, and then, the way people do, pick the best that fit into the storyline. But I actually did two years of IVF, so I was doing it over in Spain, so it was very difficult, to be honest, to get myself and Enda together. So, we’d be jumping on Zooms in between my appointments. We’d try and meet up in Dublin as much as we could.

“It was nearly three years, really, by the time that we wrote all the tracks, then went into production, and then finished up the album. We literally just finished the album in January. So, there was a big, long writing and production, and a real hurry to finish the album in January. [Laughs]”

In June 2023, Baba released the first track from the album, “Truth.” The album, which is released on May 30^th, shares this title. The finished record, Siobhan feels, is noticeably different from their initial concept. “We kept notes the whole way throughout, so if you look at the notes from the beginning, then you look at the album, you’re like, ‘This doesn’t match up’,” she says. “I thought it was going to be a really soulful album, so I was listening to a lot of Frank Ocean, Pip Millett, and, while we were writing, it just turned into something different.”

Beyond the sound, one thing that also developed during the production was the integration of the album’s interludes, which include voice notes and in-studio discussions. “That wasn’t the plan when we started out,” Siobhan explains. “But because of the way we recorded it and different things happening at different stages, it just kind of naturally fell that way.”

A standout in these interludes is the penultimate one, “Apollo’s Heartbreak Interlude,” a voice note that Siobhan recorded for her son that precedes his eponymous honorary song, “Apollo.” “I just came across that voice note,” Siobhan explains of its addition. “His second birthday was in January just gone, and I had done it just before I was going to sleep. To be honest, when I first listened to it, I was like, ‘Oh, this might be a little too much,’ and I played it for Enda, and he was like, ‘I actually just think it’s perfect.’

“So, I just think it’s important for me to give a nod to that grief and to him as a little boy, and also for other women and other people that are going through the same, that there’s no shame about it. It’s shit, but it’s happening to one in four women, and we should be being supported and we should be talking about it so we can process our grief a little better.”

Given the arduous nature of creating a full-length, added to by the vulnerability that was required in the journey, we asked Siobhan how she felt when she first heard Truth. “I’m not great at saying these kind of things, but I was really proud,” she responds.

“I was proud that I was able to push through and get to a place where I could have a cohesive body of work like that. When I look back, I don’t know how we did it. As I said, everything was disjointed. Sometimes when I listened to the songs in isolation, I was like, ‘Ugh, I don’t know how this is going to fit in with the next song.’ But then, actually, when you listen to it in full, I was like, ‘Oh, listen, the story was here all along. This was meant to be the way it was,’ even though, along the way, I wasn’t quite sure how we’d get to that point.”

To celebrate the release of Truth next week, Baba will perform at The Workman’s Cellar in Dublin tonight. “This is only going to be my second show, playing these songs, and it’s very different because it’s a full band; strings, the works,” Siobhan says of the gig. “So, again, I’m kind of anxious about it. [Laughs] We sold out Little Whelan’s in December, and that was much more stripped back, and I just felt, as I was on stage, ‘This needs a bigger band, I think.’

“It just didn’t have the same impact, so that’s why I decided to go a bit bigger with the venue and much bigger with the band! So, they’re kind of going to be guinea pigs, a little bit, because it’s going to be the first time we’ve played the songs like this.

“But I’m really excited about it and I’m excited to do more shows and things, because I’ve just been so focused on the album that I haven’t done many shows, bar the one at Christmas. But you forget how much of a buzz it is to be up on stage. So, yeah, I’m excited.”

Baba’s debut album, Truth, is released on May 30^th. Tonight, they will perform at The Workman’s Cellar, Dublin. Tickets can be purchased here. You can keep up with Baba through their Linktree.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight at 21:00 (IST) to hear this interview in full. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.

Aaron Kavanagh

Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.