Madeline Babuka Black’s earliest Slippers material, written while she was working as a nanny in New York City, was made with kids and adults in mind. The solo project’s debut EP, Here's Some Slippers, was spiritually aligned with the educational yet existential songwriting They Might Be Giants produced during their stint as a children’s music act in the ’00s: Its slivers of power pop mirrored a child’s insatiable curiosity, posing questions like, “How many people’s photos am I in?”, “Why’s my monkey always cryin’?”, and what if shirts and pants could fall in love? Since enrolling in the California Institute of the Arts’ prestigious animation program and releasing her debut LP, So You Like Slippers?, in 2024, Babuka Black has grown more concerned with the contradictions of adult life. But her disarming brevity and unpretentiousness remain. Her latest record, Slippers 08, is her most candid effort yet, grounding moments of gut-punching reality in crisp, spacious production.
Slippers 08 marks Babuka Black’s debut on Perennial, an imprint of K Records that has backed a new wave of lo-fi twee-pop revivalists like Sharp Pins and Touch Girl Apple Blossom. But where her labelmates routinely drape their songs in warm, dense fuzz, Babuka Black opts for clarity and directness. Rather than fetishizing lo-fi textural overlap, Slippers 08 rearranges the instrumental furniture to center her voice, which always cuts through despite the sizable reverb applied to the vocal track. Studio quirks are deployed as punctuation, like the blast of sci-fi synth that appears only once on “Who Escapes the Storm” to suggest uneasy self-consciousness or the fried guitar solo on “Til You Know,” which sounds like it’s shredding through the amplifier’s guts. The experimentation is effective because it’s unexpected, leaping out from within cute songs that are mixed soundly.
If Babuka Black’s first Slippers releases explored the unanswerable, 08’s appeal lies in the unsaid. These songs operate on Imagist principles, confined to a single image or snippet of conversation and sometimes eschewing a second verse to pursue a linear start-to-finish structure. On “Reading Lucy’s Diary,” the dread of getting into a too-hot car communicates stagnation succinctly enough that Babuka Black can retreat into the speaker’s looping, depressive thoughts, letting sighed vocal harmonies and breezy chord changes do the talking. “Wasted Tonight” and “Fool in Your Room” deal with the aftermath of romantic encounters that may or may not have happened. All that matters is what remains the day after, like a pilfered book or a wallet left on the nightstand. Sweet as Slippers 08 sounds, it’s often haunted by the knowledge that you can only live in the moment. The past and present are reduced to ghosts.
Reminiscent of LAKE’s closing credits theme for Adventure Time (another intersection between CalArts animation alumni and a K Records act), Slippers 08 demonstrates a quiet confidence, with delicate toplines that don’t need much more than rhythm guitar and drums to stick. Babuka Black’s economical writing and taste for the bittersweet put her comfortably in the lineage of K icons like Rose Melberg and Lois Maffeo. The music’s so easy to listen to, you might not notice it’s making you ache.
