Baths at Headrow House

2025 marks Will Wiesenfeld’s first Baths album in eight years, and his first show in Leeds in seven. It’s a big moment, then, as he brings his fourth record, Gut, to Headrow House this May.

A classically trained musician, Wiesenfeld began making music at an early age while growing up in Los Angeles. He studied piano and taught himself guitar, contrabass and viola, while becoming fascinated with electronic music ranging from Euro-pop to trance via IDM. Then he discovered his biggest inspiration – Björk – and found that his varied interests could coalesce. Still a teenager, he turned his hand to producing, developing a layered style that mixed sounds like clicking pens and running water with electronics and live instruments.

Wiesenfeld emerged as an artist in the late 2000s ‘LA beat’ scene alongside the likes of Flying Lotus, Shlohmo, and Daedelus – all known for blending experimental electronic music with elements of hip-hop, glitch, and ambient. He experimented with various monikers and styles, creating folktronica as [Post-Foetus] and Eno-inspired ambient as Geotic, before finding something that felt like home in Baths.

Bath’s debut album Curulean brought a new idea to the LA beat scene. Glitched-out electronica got filtered through a pop lens, with layered, dreamy vocals at the foreground. Things got darker on 2013’s Obsidian, into which Wiesenfeld poured all his frustrations and desires – for growth, escape, and even death. The best tracks – like ‘Worsening’ and ‘Iron Works’ – are magic tricks of production, bringing messy, disparate layers of stuttering beats, icy synths and Satie-like piano into fluid whole, unmistakably his.

Pure pleasure returned with 2017’s Romaplasm, inspired by the escapism and romance of comics, anime, and games. Makes sense – at the time he’d just recorded the theme song to a game called Dream Daddy – a gay-dad dating simulator where “you play as a Dad and your goal is to meet and romance other hot Dads”. By absorbing fantasy, and embracing a bit of absurdity, a sense of fun returned to Baths’ music.

And it’s still there on Gut, which is full of giddy, queer pleasure while embracing a more muscular, aggressive sound, bolstered by guitars and even, now and then, scream vocals. The layers are as complex as ever, but more lush and dreamy now, with tracks like ‘Peacocking’ veering into woozy indie pop territory, while ‘American Mythos’ has a rawer, punkier edge. Another gear shift’s found in the lyrics, which get a hell of a lot more honest, mirroring the hedonistic feel of the music – from “fucking all the men in droves” on ‘Sea of Men’ to  “I’m the sweat/Pressed on his tits/Slip into my ellipsis” on mid-album highlight ‘Eden’.

The flipside to this open indulgence in lust are tracks that consider the scrutiny of it by those both outside and within the community. “My genetic disparity is a prison of scenery,” he confesses on ‘Governed’, while on the chorus of ‘Homosexuals’, he turns the scrutiny on himself, admitting “None of how I’ve loved is working”.

But save for these moments of darker introspection, Gut is in the main a fun burst of raw hedonism – as direct as anything he’s released. This is good news for the live shows, which, assuming they’ll match the vibe, should be the most fun Baths’ performances yet. Leeds-based Baths fans, seven years might be worth the wait…