28-year-old Arabella Sarah Lennox Latham, best known for her music under the stage name Baby Queen, has been on quite the wild ride over the last six years. Signing with Polydor Records, her debut single, “Internet Religion,” dropped in the height of the COVID pandemic, and the subsequent EP, Medicine, was mainly written, recorded, and produced in a makeshift studio in her bedroom.
From there, her trajectory only accelerated: she landed direct support slots for both Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour Tour across the UK in 2022, then hopped onto Conan Gray’s Superache Tour the same year. Her music found an even wider audience when she wrote two songs for Netflix’s hit series “Heartstopper” (“Colours of You, “We Can Be Anything”) as well as her song “Raw Thoughts” being featured in the show. She toured across the UK, played Glastonbury, Bonnaroo, SXSW, Governors Ball, the list goes on and on… But just a few years after her 2023 debut album Quarter Life Crisis was released, Latham made a sharp turn: at the beginning of 2026, she parted ways with Polydor and Joined Insanity Records with hopes of finding inspiration somewhere new: and perhaps with a new collaborator.
The result? Her sophomore album, I Hope You Don’t Remember Me: a deliberate departure from her earlier work, traded in for something more raw and free from inhibition. But the road to creating art without the weight of external expectations was not a smooth one. Last week, Bella and I sat down for a Zoom call to discuss the journey to creating this album and how this time around, she’s doing it a bit differently.
Staged Haze: How is the week going up to the release going? How are you feeling?
BQ: I guess I’m taking it one day at a time and trying to enjoy life as well, which gets a little bit difficult, you know.
Staged Haze: Yeah. You have written in your email newsletters that [the creative process has] been isolating and you’ve been like staying up late working on this album. How do you balance feeling “mentally okay” and still putting all of that effort into this project?
BQ: Good question. I historically haven’t been very good at finding a life balance, so it’s kind of been, and particularly during the making of this album, very isolating. I respond to that really well creatively, so you’re kind of at odds with what would be good for you as an artist and then what would be good for your happiness.
Generally, your happiness isn’t so good for your art. I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m trying to expand my world more and remind myself of things that I like, but it’s a pretty short list.
Staged Haze: What do you do when you need a moment away from that process and you just need to give yourself some space to turn your brain off?
BQ: I used to play video games and now I watch reality TV or murder documentaries.
Staged Haze: Okay, I feel you so hard because I’m either watching murder documentaries or Love Island so…
BQ: The murder documentaries are like, my favorite thing, but I feel like sometimes reality TV is just like…I don’t know…it makes me feel normal, you know. It also makes me think that I’m never gonna find love because I see the way that people behave and I’m like… “cool.”
Staged Haze: Tell me just a little bit more about how this album came to be. I know it’s been some time since you last released an album like three years ago, right?
BQ: It was born out of this very lonely, solipsistic period of time in my life where I felt like I was very wronged by the world and by like, everything. I felt this sense of rejection and almost as if it was me against the world.
I was making these demos on my laptop by myself and I really wanted to return that sense that I had when I was making the first EP: complete freedom and control and this intense trust of instinct. Just finding what it was that I wanted to hear, away from the concept of anyone else receiving it or having opinions about it.
It was just this hyperfixated, obsessive period of time where there was a sense of faith that, you know, every time you sit and do something, make a synth line or program something or write one lyric, you’re getting closer to having something great on the other side. It didn’t come from a good place, but it was a very magical process because of how bad the place was that it came from.
Staged Haze: Do you feel like it was easy to trust yourself and give yourself the space to just make what you wanted to hear? Because I can imagine it’s daunting. Just reliving the ride of you releasing your first single six years ago. You toured a lot, you made so many fans, and your music was featured in a Netflix series. Is it easy for you to just believe that you can make what you want to make, or did that take a lot of time to buy into that [idea]?
BQ: That was really difficult. Being signed to a major label. I believe that if you’re gonna be a part of an institution, that [institution] expects something from you because they’ve given you something. You always have something biting at your heels. You never feel like you’re creating for creation’s sake. You feel like you’re creating as a means to an end or you’re scared of failure and I think that fear is such an enemy of true creativity.
So yeah, that was difficult for me for a long time. I stopped working with my first record label and I felt like everything was over. I had this ego death because I was falling in love with someone who basically ghosted me for two months and I was like ‘I’m gonna quit, like I’m not doing this anymore.’ And I think that at that point when you don’t have any expectations tied to you, and it’s nothing but your drive to create something great, that’s fucking magical.
I think that it’s difficult for life to present you with these perfect, these creatively perfect scenarios that are able to erupt into something great in your life, you know.
I think that some artists are better at defending their creative instinct, you know what I mean, like a Charli xcx, she’s not taking shit, she’s just gonna say ‘fuck off,’ but I think that a lot of artists want to impress and they want to please. I think that you’re caught in this difficult dynamic that is so not conducive to being a great artist.
I wish I had better boundaries of myself, but I was really able to trust my instincts making this record, like musically, it was a decision that I made but I really struggle with it in every other aspect of life, like defending my beliefs or even knowing what my beliefs are or what I think.
Staged Haze: What is your favorite song on this project? Mine, I haven’t heard [the album] obviously, but my favorite is “Permanently Obsessed,” that song always stuck in my head. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the [songs] you feel super proud of, or some that were more challenging [to make] than others?
BQ: I love the song called “Bored Out of My Mind,” It feels like, I don’t know, like it takes a big step into Smashing Pumpkins world, and it’s like something that I feel is in me. I’s just such a simple song that I wrote on the guitar and I really fucking love that song and then, yeah, “Permanently Obsessed” was a nightmare to write: that bass line in the chorus was one of my finest moments of all time, like, but I mean, I’m talking like 400 muted tracks of different things that were tried in different sections constantly. It was just an impossible song. I’m just like, don’t even bring that song anywhere near me.
“Abigail,” the first song on the record, is the emotional core of the album, it was a deeply personal song that I didn’t think I would release when I wrote it. I really, really love this album, like, I really love it. I’ve got a few notes but you have to stop at a certain point.
Staged Haze: Do you consider yourself a perfectionist?
BQ: Yeah, to an absolutely horrific degree.
Staged Haze: So, you worked on this album with a new collaborator, right? How did that come to be?
BQ: I was in this period of time where I was free-roaming. I had enough of everything, I had enough of everyone. I was working on ideas, but I was never finishing anything. I kind of wanted to do it myself, but I knew that there was a limitation to what I was able to do at that point.
I did have a few weird sessions that my label had put me in and I would play my demos from my laptop and the guy would be, like, “oh, cool, so, like, there’s no chorus, that’s really cool,” like it was not going well for me.
I knew that I wanted to do something different to how I’d done that [early] music. I needed to find something in myself again. So I went on this pilgrimage and I had one day off in LA and I asked one of my friends if there was anyone that he thought was cool. He suggested that I should meet with Alex [Casnoff]. We have a very similar ethos in terms of like, what the role of the artist is, what the point of art is, what is great art, what it takes to make great art and we had the same sort of childlike ambition.
It was amazing. We recorded it with some of the most incredible musicians, rehearsing, recording it all in the room, staring at each other, playing these songs, so it was something completely different to how I’d experienced making music and it changed the way that I think about making music.
Staged Haze: It’s interesting because you said you were spending so much time alone writing, and then you go into the studio and you’re collaborating: it’s two ends of two extremes, so that’s interesting to see how they come together and create the final product.
You mentioned that one song is, like, Smashing Pumpkins-esque. Are there any other musicians or sounds or, like, inspirations you feel, like, influence this [record] or is it more just “you?”
BQ: I don’t consume music as a consumer, really. I will on occasion. I’ll do it in social situations or when I’m, like, cycling somewhere or on the train, but sometimes I just put my headphones in and don’t listen to anything. Before I started writing this album, I wanted to do this journey through the greatest albums ever made, so I was only listening to the consensus of the Top 50.
Alex brought a very eclectic influence. We were listening to, like, Randy Newman and, like, Liz Phair and The Replacements and Magnetic Fields.
You wouldn’t expect that to be where the influences were coming from sonically if you had heard my previous music. But it’s weird, because it still feels like a Baby Queen album. I guess I did think about, like, Prince, like, with “I Hope You Don’t Remember Me,” I wanted to do something, like, do you know what I mean?
Staged Haze: Yeah, I definitely hear that now that you say it, that makes sense.
BQ: Yeah, and I think that your influences are your influences. I’ve gone through a period of time consuming enough of an artist, like, we know The 1975 or, like, even my huge period of time in my life eating up Taylor Swift, that is always going to be in me, you know, going through a ‘90s music phase of, like, loving The Smashing Pumpkins. I could go five years without ever listening to it, but it’s still in there, so I genuinely do think that what you listen to changes your output, which is why I maybe don’t want to do it.
It’s quite sad, do you know what I mean? I feel quite jealous of musicians that love music.
Staged Haze: So, what’s next? The album’s coming out, what else are you excited for, anything?
BQ: There’ll definitely be some touring coming up, which I’m excited about. I’m going to Mexico for the first time for Corona Capital at the end of the year, which will be amazing, because I’m playing that with the guys I recorded the record with. Right now, I’m trying to figure out what I am going to do next, sonically, and it comes with a decision: do I intentionally lean into one of these routes, or do I just allow what will be to be? Or I could quit. I consider that all the time. So yeah, day by day for me.
It’s been a long time, I’m, I’m really excited to have something out in the world, you know, and, uh, yeah, hopefully people fuck with it. We’ll soon find out.
I Hope You Don’t Remember Me drops on July 24.
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