The idea of being adverse to genre is repeated to the point of cliché amongst "underground" artists. Everyone wants to be mysterious and no one wants to be boxed in. That said, few musicians have wandered as far as wide as Baba. Over the last decade, he's made American primitive guitar music, produced for Yung Lean, crafted leftfield house tracks that led to a jetsetting DJ life, won a prestigious Guldbagge Award for his scoring work and, as of late, worked on plaintive, stripped-down guitar songs. "I want to be scared, I don't want to know what I'm doing," Stiltz once said in an interview.


At this point in the story, you may view Baba as some nonchalant, sunglassed savant. A former model and Royal Swedish Opera House-trained ballet dancer who is plundering genres before getting distracted and moving onto something else. A dilettante. In fact, Baba's recent music, such as Paid Testimony (2023, Public Possession) and Blurb (his much-lauded collaboration with Okay Kaya from earlier this year), reveals an artist who is, as he recently said in The Guardian, in the midst of a battle with the ego. This music is an attempt to strip away all artifice—fuck the glitz and glamour—even if what remains is very fucking cool. "Young professionals carelessly living," he sings in a laconic, Lou Reed-esque baritone on the Paid Testimony track "Stockholm," before looking in the mirror. "I can't say that I'm not jealous, even though I live my life just like they do."


Baba's childhood set the stage for his peripatetic adult life, yanked back and forth between Vacaville, California and Stockholm, learning to write songs on guitar as a child and eventually coming up in the latter city's heady leftfield house scene and releasing on venerated imprints like Studio Barnhus and XL Recordings. As a busy DJ and producer he crisscrossed the world through a warren of green rooms, fancy hotels and airport lounges, having fun, then, perhaps inevitably, developing the gnawing feeling that he needed to return to the source. "As an artist, I want to interact with music in a pretty deep way," Baba said in an interview from 2023. "For a while, I felt like I was slipping away from that. I have a responsibility as someone who makes music to kind of be like, “Okay, well, fucking put your money where your mouth is and do something about it.”


The music he's made since, after a move to LA and a couple of private-press instrumental guitar mixtapes, feels incisive and character-driven, his most profound work to date. A notebook, a guitar, a four-track, a million miles in the rear view that are just starting to come into focus. Keep your eyes on the road.

Matt McDermott