Out today Baba’s – pastel pop single ‘Sad Party’

Siobhán Lynch, better known by her stage name Baba, shares her bittersweet, luminous pop single ‘Sad Party’ via Welcome To The New World and the accompanying music video today. Baba wrote the song’s chorus—‘I’ve just been to a real sad party, everybody’s crying over something new’—immediately after having friends over for a melancholy, between-lockdowns shindig. 

Baba explains: “I wrote the chorus of ‘Sad Party’ during one of the first easings of the covid restrictions, when you could have six people in your garden with a cheeseburger on their head or whatever those crazy rules were. My friends were never off social media during lockdown and looked like they were having a ball: baking, hosting virtual quizzes with cocktails, and so I imagined that this was going to be an incredibly fun reunion. But after a few drinks, everyone was literally crying, they were all so miserable and a little crazy. Being cooped up, as we all were, was making them really have to confront their lives. Some of them were just really lonely and struggling. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.”

A year later, Baba and her producer, Enda Gallery, flew to Lisbon to finish writing the song. She found herself in a slump of a different kind, having unsuccessfully been doing rounds of IVF and needing a change of scenery. 

“We wrote during the day and drank wine and hiked the Lisbon hills at night, eating in delicious restaurants. It was a really brilliant and productive experience. We wrote four demos—a song a day, including ‘Sad Party’,” Baba recalls.

The music video for ‘Sad Party’ explores “the irony of how technology, meant to bring us closer together, has in some ways pushed us further apart,” as Baba puts it. Directed by Owen Behan, the camera follows performers Tobi Balogun, Oyena Sixaba, Danya James and Adeshope Adeneye, who may be clustered together on the floor, but are lost in their own separate worlds as the glowing gold light of phone screens illuminate their faces.