“I grew up assuming it would be easier to accept my true self the older I got,” explains Babytooth’s Isabel Zacharias. “In my experience, though, it actually gets more difficult—not because my patience wanes, but because I keep changing.” This dawning realisation is the kernel around which the band’s new single ‘Still From Sinking’ develops. It’s the first glimpse of their forthcoming self-titled debut on Antiquated Future which acknowledges our propensity to change over time, and looks to find acceptance all the same.
Based in Portland, OR, Babytooth is led by Zacharias and sees Annie Fifer (Yellow Room), Hugh Jepson (Soft Cheese, Moon Shy) and Benson Chong (Honeydiu, How Strange It Is) lend guitar, drums and bass/keys respectively. The project announced itself back in 2020 with EP Thataway on Bud Tapes. A collection of songs which not only marked the band’s position at the intersection between nineties and contemporary indie styles, but moreover Zacharias’s distinctive lyricism. Each track a small slice of life where modest details accumulate into something larger. The voice often emotive and sometimes playful, somehow both vulnerable and defiant in the face of existence, and never without a memorable turn of phrase. “If we’re gonna summarize a life,” as Zacharias sings on opener ‘Whatever Machine’, “then we’re gonna knock its teeth out.”
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The threads of ‘Still From Sinking’ can be traced back to ‘Whatever Machine’. It was a track similarly concerned with what it means to be yourself, and how much energy can be expended moulding or denying the various states that might take. But where previous songs might have settled for cathartic acknowledgement of this phenomenon, the new single pushes further. An attempt to make peace with your own changeability by looking outwards at others and allowing yourself the kindness and affection you might afford to them. “I recognise you from loving you forever / you sway across my brain in your boogie shoes,” as Zacharias sings. “I get to thinking that nothing stays together / still I see you there and you look so complete to me.”
The lines capture the song’s small epiphany. For if one is able to love another unburdened by what they were or might have been, then why can’t the same apply to our relationships with ourselves? Can we not just exist as we are in any given moment? ‘Still From Sinking’ sees Babytooth answer these questions affirmatively, learning to let go if never quite forget past versions of the self in order to more fully embrace existence day to day. As Zacharias concludes: “To see yourself, even for a moment, in this way—as a finished portrait—to me, is the definition of self-love.”
