Waterbaby releases debut album “Memory be a blade”

The edge of the knife shatters the glass of the camera lens into cobwebs. Waterbaby, or Kendra Egerbladh, cuts the lens with the thin tip of a knife in the crucial scene in the music video for “Memory be a Blade”. The song is also the title track of their debut album.

With lines like “Looking back on a lonely night / Looking back on the day / Memory is the sharpest knife, memory is a blade“She wants to portray the agony of being stuck in your memories.

– I am a very sentimental person and like to relive things in my memory, but I have also realized that living too much in your head can be harmful. “It can affect development, and I wanted to explore that in the song and on the album,” says Waterbaby.

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Waterbaby was born in 1997 and remembers his childhood with many moves to the various suburbs of Stockholm, where music was a constant companion. The Mother starred Destiny’s Child, Jill Scott and Esperanza Spalding. The father listened to Ghanaian and West African folk music and his favorite artist was Dolly Parton. In addition, Kendra’s great-grandfather was a jazz pianist, the maternal uncle organized clubs in Stockholm and the maternal grandmother worked at the state foundation Rikskonserter, which organized concerts both in Sweden and internationally.

At the age of thirteen she began singing in a gospel choir and spent her primary school years in Adolf Fredrik’s music classes in Stockholm. The high school years were no exception, where she studied music at the Kulturama. However, it was only later that she realized that she had chosen a skirt line.

– I understood it only in the second year. “It was like the rockers in my class,” she laughs.

When she was in her mid-teens, she received a message on Instagram from artist Seinabo Sey saying they were collaborating. Since then, Waterbaby has followed Seinabo Sey, but also did her hair and makeup during the tours.

– I remember driving behind her on the way west. It was like being lowered into a tank overwhelmingsays Water Baby.

A few years later She started spending time with the artist Hannes, with whom she later released a huge hit. But before that, they experienced a pivotal moment in their musical careers.

– We were swimming in Gambia and I said “I think my stage name should be Waterbaby” and he said “Damn, that’s nice,” she laughs.

Kendra means water baby in Welsh and it was also a nickname that a close friend had long given her.

“It’s a very personal name for me, but it also creates a kind of distance between me and my art,” she says.

In April 2022, Hannes and Waterbaby released their joint song “Stockholmsvy”, which was a success. At the time of writing, there are 92 million streams on Spotify.

Since then, she has been awarded the Music Publisher’s Fellowship, received two Grammy nominations, and was nominated as a 2024 P3 Gold Artist of the Future. In 2023, British newspaper The Guardian wrote that she was an artist to watch.

Now she is releasing her debut album “Memory be a blade,” and she realizes she’s having trouble describing its sound:

– It’s cross-genre, but it feels like all music is in the moment. All lines are blurred. “But for me it’s a mix of all my influences and I think it’s being heard,” she says, continuing:

“People who are listening can say that they are hearing references that I myself don’t know exist until someone brings them up,” she says.

For Waterbaby, it was a process of realizing that what she had been signing for two years was going to be an album. It evolved from a double single to an EP, a mini-album and now a full album.

– I wasn’t emotionally prepared to go into this being my debut album. Am I like this and this is what I sound like when I let it go?

She co-wrote the album with Marcus White and Anton Fernandez. She describes the writing process as a time of change: she is in her mid-20s, between adolescence and adulthood.

– I had a lot of growing pains, it was a very transformative time and it shows in the music, she says and continues:

– There have been several times when I wrote a text and months later I realized that it was a spiritual prophecy for something that I was actually thinking or feeling, but didn’t understand at the time. I really felt it called alone.

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