Baths, the one-person project from the Los Angeles musician Will Wiesenfeld, came up during the early-’00s chillwave moment and released three albums over the course of that decade. It’s been silent for a while. The last Baths album was 2017’s Romaplasm, and other than a 2020 B-sides collection, the project has been mostly quiet since then, while Wiesenfeld has continued to release music through his dance-music alter-ego Geotic. But now Baths is back.

In a few months, Will Wiesenfeld will release Gut, his first new Baths album in seven years. Wiesenfeld started making the album before the COVID lockdown, and it’s been finished for a couple of years. He produced all of it himself, and some of the songs have live drums. The album uses guitars and strings, too, and a press release claims noisier post-punk influences like Gilla Band, Protomartyr, and A Frames.

“Sea Of Men” is a jittery indie-pop track with a whole lot of falsetto. Here’s what Wiesenfeld has to say about the LP:

I find myself thinking about how confusingly animal I often feel — present in body but dissociative in spirit, instinctual. An entire life where appetite comes first and “carnal is a normal mode,” leaving little room to discover anything new about myself while constantly scavenging for the next gratification…

I think about men, and sex, quite literally all the time. To make a new album that felt like an actual honest effort meant exploring this fact further than I’ve ever been comfortable with, with no regard to personal embarrassment or relatability… I’m sketching my strongest and most pervasive feelings out quickly and treating their roughness as gospel, then exploring them in greater detail with the added sheen of time and perspective. I ended up not just writing about sex but also about personal shortcomings, dreamless living, harmful fantasies, and dissonant self-identities, things I also think about all the time.

In the self-directed “Sea Of Men” video, Wiesenfeld and his backing band wear matching black dresses and play to a small audience in an all-white room. Below, check out that video and the Gut tracklist.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Eyewall”
02 “Sea Of Men”
03 “Peacocking”
04 “Eden”
05 “Homosexuals”
06 “Cedar Stairwell”
07 “American Mythos”
08 “Chaos”
09 “Governed”
10 “Verity”
11 “The Sound Of A Blooming Flower”

Gut is out 2/21 on Basement’s Basement.