'Babies' is the new release from Liz Lawrence

Liz Lawrence shares ‘Babies’ another taste of her third studio album ‘The Avalanche’, due digitally on September 17th 2021. This album will be supported by an extensive run of UK headline shows later this year.

Compared to her previous record ‘Pity Party’, which saw Lawrence look inward for inspiration, the wild, vibrant ‘Babies’ is on the less autobiographical side. The third track to be released from her upcoming album, it was initially inspired by “videos of babies laughing on the internet, which is a panacea for all ills”, the song sees Lawrence inhabiting a character desperately trying to drag themselves out of drudgery. “I thought of a man who’s driving to work every morning and saying goodbye to his wife, kissing her on the cheek and then going to sit in his car, even though he lost his job months ago.” It’s a joyful ride that parodies self-help tutorials and sees Lawrence flexing her voice in brand new ways. “I’ve been singing pretty for a long time, and I wanted to try new things. So I’ve machoed it up. Babies is one of my favourite tracks on the record. I felt like I was exorcising some demons with it, just for fun.”

‘The Avalanche’, due for release September 17th 2021, came quickly. Lawrence wrote, arranged and played everything herself, and for the first time, she produced the entire album, too. It allowed her to distill the essence of her celebrated live shows onto record. “I feel like there’s power and aggression in the way I perform live, and I wanted to capture that on The Avalanche,” she explains. “It was a complete pleasure to write. I’d had all that anxiety around releasing ‘Pity Party’ [her 2nd studio album] after such a long period of not writing under my own name. But I was buzzing off the fact that people were receptive to it live, and it gave me so much confidence to make this.”

Lawrence has harnessed her on-stage exuberance into a muscular, extroverted record. “I like to dance, and I like to move, and I wanted to make a record that people would move to quite naturally,” she says, acknowledging that it marks a shift. “I wanted it to have motion. I think it’s quite silly, and it’s joyful, and I’m not always sure people expect that from me.” The songs are not so personal this time, informed by the world as well as what was going on in her own life. “I think that was a conscious decision. I’m becoming really aware of my own narcissism, and in fact the narcissism all around us.” It’s a theme Lawrence explored on 2019’s ‘Pity Party’, particularly on the droll single ‘None Of My Friends’, which was written pre-lockdown, but seemed to capture a certain lockdown mood. This time, she wanted to look beyond her own life. “I didn’t necessarily want to offer myself in that way again. I can be a real voyeur, and I was interested in what everyone else was doing. This is my Rear Window record.”