The New Loud (Darcy Blue), Babes In Canyon’s full-length debut, has been percolating for quite some time. Over the past three years, the Seattle duo has been diligently synthesizing its folk and ’80s-pop influences via a series of shimmering singles and EPs. Already partners in life, Nathan and Sophia Hamer’s musical partnership solidified during some intense writing sessions in a remote cabin as winter rains poured down. Later, with Nathan drawing on his experience as a founding member of the electro-Americana band Kuinka, the two fleshed out their clear-eyed batch of love (and loss) songs at their home studio in rural Washington. Jerry Streeter (Brandi Carlile, Lumineers, Vance Joy) helped with engineering and mixing. Kuinka’s Michelle Nuño pitched in on bass, and Matt Bishop (Two Door Cinema Club, Beaches) handled mastering.
Nathan and Sophia offer a release-day rundown of The New Loud, which we are proud to premiere today.
1) “The New Loud”
Nathan: “We spent a rainy stretch of winter held up in a cabin on the southern coast of Washington, unplugged from the world, writing day and night with our drum machine and loop station. ‘The New Loud’ was the first song we wrote on the album, exploring that feeling of stillness and isolation.”
Sophia: “Having spent years living in New York and Los Angeles, finding peace away from the party is a new chapter for us. I also had to be honest with myself that I’d become more reserved and less interested in being around people I didn’t feel genuinely connected to. Quiet is the new loud.”
2) “Too Much”
Nathan: “Sometimes I like to write in a genre I call ‘party music for sad people.’ This is one of those songs. I wanted a strong disco heartbeat I could pair with the more melancholic lyrics I was exploring. It’s easy to feel like everyone else has things figured out while you’re stumbling in the dark. Sometimes, it’s just too much.”
Sophia: “While each song on the album stands on its own, we did order the album to tell a story. The opening track is a thesis statement of sorts, while ‘Too Much’ is the start of the journey into the album.”
3) “Elegy”
Sophia: “I was mourning multiple people in my life who were still very much alive but were lost to me—and the world—due to addiction and untreated mental illness. This song started when I realized I’d done all I could, and their fates weren’t in my control. There were two notes repeating in my head on a comforting, meditative loop while I wrote the lyrics. We built the song on top of those two notes and expanded the lyrics to feel like an empowering incantation as you say goodbye.”
Nathan: “The song Sophia brought to the table was beautiful. We just added the driving, thumpy beat behind it. It’s fun harmonizing together, especially when it’s a song Sophia has crafted the melody to, because the countermelody I’m singing can really alter the vibe of the song. The chorus to this one developed a bit more of a country twang to it, and that’s just due to the joining of our voices and the harmonies that call to us.”
4) “One Day, One Night”
Nathan: “A lot of the album is a call and response between two people, discovering what it means to fall in love during tumultuous times. This was born entirely from playing around with the loop machine, initially with layers upon layers of ukulele and mandolin tracks. I started mumbling nonsense into the microphone, finding a cadence that felt right. Eventually, lyrics started forming, and Sophia helped round out the second half. It’s a love song, but more a romantic lullaby—letting the person know you understand their past and the dark corners of their upbringing, and that it’s safe to jump into something new.”
5) “Strange”
Sophia: “‘Coming out of the haze,’ the first lyric, really sums up this song, which explores trauma-driven memory loss. After a chain of tumultuous events in my life, I’d take these long, meandering walks, trying to feel present again. The lyrics started forming as I processed the past in real time. I wrote them as a mantra to keep moving forward when my nervous system was keeping me frozen and stuck in an endless loop of half-formed memories. ‘Strange’ is meant to accompany a walk down the road away from disaster and into the unknown.”
Nathan: “The end of the song was particularly fun to craft. I remember discovering this moment late at night in the cabin, with Sophia doing the vocal distortions live into the mic, while I tapped out the booming 808 beats on the drum machine.”
6) “Yosemite”
Sophia: “This song came together very quickly and naturally between the two of us, on a rainy morning after we’d gotten terrible sleep. Nathan started playing a melody to me on the mandolin, built the entire song using the looper for the first time. Even as an instrumental, it felt like it was clearly an expression of love. Lyrics flowed from me naturally, because I was feeling especially flawed and damaged at that time. I wanted to celebrate the bond we’d created that was such a safe place for us both. We met when we were pretty young, and we’ve both had to grow and challenge ourselves to step up for each other. I wanted the song to celebrate how two flawed people can still be strong for one another, and how love can be an awe-inspiring constant if you keep working at it.”
Nathan: “I’ve always written the mandolin into songs, but this was the first time I gave space for a more traditional mandolin sound. While building the initial loop, I might’ve sat and played the mandolin solo melody for over an hour. It can be incredibly meditative to fully absorb yourself in a song, adding and taking away pieces as you feel.”
7) “Baskets & Bones”
Sophia: “We were sitting in the cabin just after sundown, and I was wrestling with a bout of anxiety, so I started naming things I could see … ‘baskets and bones, secondhand clothes.’ I jotted that down and went for a solo walk on the beach. I’d recently lost multiple family members in rapid succession, and I’d let my mind get quiet to reflect on them and try to send messages of love. I realized I wasn’t sure where to send the messages anymore, that I have no idea where they are … not really. A girl walked past me on the beach, and she looked exactly like a younger version of me. I might’ve been imagining it. But for some reason, I felt like a past version of myself started speaking through me to write this song, as a message calling out to the people I’ve lost.”
Nathan: “My favorite part of the track are the synth horns we laid down. They provide such a foundational bedrock to the song. The beat was also interesting to craft, something more fluid and rolling than I’m used to constructing.”
8) “In The Garden”
Nathan: “Maybe it was something about being locked away in this remote cabin, unplugged from the world, taking long rainy strolls on the windswept beach each morning, but I felt a calling to write these heartfelt, reassuring love songs. They’re also, in a way, almost opposites of traditional love songs. They aren’t dewy-eyed or about the initial throes of attraction. They’re more about the deep warmth and embrace having a kindred soul in life can bring. The song itself came together quite quickly, building off deep 808 drum loops with lots of empty space for vocals and ambient synths. Having Sophia as a musical partner sometimes feels like a superpower. When I’m tapped out of lyrics, she can plug herself into a song and find the thread I’d lost so adeptly.”
9) “Get Rich Slow”
Sophia: “Someone on the internet called this ‘the married millennial anthem’—and I think that’s accurate. Before I pivoted my life to focus on music, I was feeling extremely burnt out from years of working myself to death, climbing various career ladders with what felt like very little to show for it. Creatively, I often get frustrated because the scope of my visions is way bigger than my resources can support. At any given point, I feel like we could be teetering on the edge of fulfillment or total ruin. Writing this song helped me remember that we’ll probably go through periods of both extremes, but the journey is worth it with the right companion.”
10) “Sunset Song”
Nathan: “We’d just finished a long, quiet stroll at sunset, watching the colors in the sky change from hazy yellow to deep red and pink as the mist took over the beach and the light faded entirely. I picked up my ukulele as soon as we got back to the cabin and looped the finger-picking chord progression. It felt like a perfect encapsulation of what I’d felt on the beach. It was also toward the end of our writing session, so there was this built-in nostalgia I was feeling for every sunset we’d spent together. Sophia wrote some beautifully descriptive lyrics that really paint the wistfulness we feel on the coast. I performed the cello-like section at the end on the baritone ukulele using a tiny bow. The frogs at the end were recorded in a nearby field, a hallmark sound of the Pacific Northwest that we’d fallen asleep to each night. It felt like a fitting end to the album.”
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