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The first single from St. Paul trio Baby Boys is here, preceding their self-produced debut EP I’m Set, due out on March 1 via Grand Jury Music. The indie-pop side project consists of Hippo Campus cofounders Jake Luppen and Nathan Stocker, here exploring new artistic avenues—via what a press release calls “a purposely chaotic creative free-for-all”—alongside Caleb Hinz of Happy Children.
Baby Boys, like their namesake, are focused on having fun—they prioritize spontaneity over painstaking care, thriving on enthusiasm and finding creative liberation in the process. “It seems like right now so many people are overly ambitious about trying to reach a particular goal in whatever they’re working on,” says Hinz in a statement. “It would be cool if everyone could take away the same feeling we got from making this EP, which is that not everything has to be so serious and profound all the time. You can have fun making things with your friends in a very lighthearted way, and it can still be just as meaningful.” Stocker adds of the band’s creative process, “Everything was grown on the spot, written on the spot, recorded on the spot. We never really gave ourselves time to think too much, so the most inspiring part was always sitting in the energy after a song was made and feeling like, ‘What the hell just happened?’”
The trio’s “yes, and” mentality shines through on their shape-shifting EP opener “Kinky Toe,” titled after a tequila-fueled foot injury Hinz suffered during an early recording session. The song opens on a Dirty Projectors-esque wavelength, all glitchy samples and hushed, feathery vocals until it blows wide open a minute in, a cascading acoustic guitar riff and reverberant beat casting the track in a downright radiant glow. “Kinky Toe” stuffs a fistful of ideas into its sub-three-minute runtime, refusing to walk any kind of line, euphoric and unexpected all the way through. “It’s about my wife and being really happy with what we have together, and not feeling like I need anything more than the relationships that already exist in my life,” explains Hinz. Sentiment and song alike are lovely, the kind of thing that couldn’t possibly exist, except it does.
Watch the “Kinky Toe” video (dir. Ethan Nelson) and see the details of I’m Set below. You can preorder Baby Boys’ debut EP here.
I’m Set EP Tracklist:
01. Kinky Toe
02. WannaBe
03. Beatdown
04. Kleenex
05. Parcel
I’m Set EP Album Art:
