We’ve touched on this before, but few artists have experienced a glow up in recent years quite like Baby Queen. The South African-born, London-based anti-pop artist born Bella Latham first crashed our digital pages back in Summer 2020 with rousing single “Buzzkill”, and ever since has released jam after jam after jam, including this past January’s early SOTY contender “Raw Thoughts”. Now she’s getting ready to drop her debut mixtape, The Yearbook, out September 3 via Island Records/slowplay, and hits this week with a colorful teen-life video for “You Shaped Hole,” the fifth track to be featured from the release. Watch it below.
“I really wanted this video to bring the adolescent tumult of the song to life,” says Baby Queen. “It’s set in a high school in North East London and follows a solitary journey through heartbreak, pain and the boundless determination to rise above those feelings. I wanted to capture the passion I felt when I wrote it, and there was something about the idea of dancing around empty hallways and yelling the lyrics into the abyss that felt intimate and strangely familiar.”
The 10 songs on The Yearbook all center around Baby Queen’s relocation to London as a teenager, and how she feel in with the city’s vibrant nightlife scene and experienced all the coming-of-age drama a young person often does in the big city. And “You Shaped Hole” is no exception, in all its heartbreak glory.
“I was super heartbroken when I wrote this song, and my ex was dating this beautiful supermodel after dumping me in Clissold Park in North East London,” she adds. “I went through a bit of a wild phase, as one does, and was doing everything I could possibly do to feel better. At the time I had this image in my mind of a hole inside my body that was shaped exactly like my ex, and it was as if I was trying to fill that hole in any way I could, but the things I was filling it with never reached the corners or made me feel any better, they just cluttered my life.”