Above all else, Baggio is about the little moments which make up a life. The long-running project of songwriter Ben Wyborn, Baggio’s subtle, self-reflexive music has always been about moments and episodes, the stitches in the fabric of the everyday without which nothing quite makes sense; yet on new album The Dreadful Human Tangle, those intricacies are more vivid, more rounded and more resonant than ever.

One of many reasons for this may be this release’s sense of scale. It’s the first full-length Baggio record to feature the ever-expanding Baggio live band, a gently-rotating squad of players from disparate corners of the South London DIY scene (including members of Lilo, The Late Joe Bowman, Scrounge, Phil Graves, Nudista, Half-Lung Club, Lou Terry and many more) – a scene of which Wyborn themself has been a vital part for several years now. The record also features artwork by award-winning painter Lulu Bennett, and will be released via one of the scene’s key labels, Double Dare. This wide range of contributors not only allows Baggio to build grander, more complex arrangements, it also gives Wyborn more options to frame the essence of their songs more sympathetically; perhaps counter-intuitively, a bigger band has afforded Baggio songs with more room to breathe, not less.

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this newly-broadened scope is the range of genres on The Dreadful Human Triangle. Although there’s no shortage of the contemplative, Americana-tinged folk-rock that will be very familiar to long-term Baggio fans (‘Dull Ache’, ‘I Have Thought About You Every Single Second Today’, ‘It’s Goodbye From Me’), there’s a welcome injection of pop immediacy across the record, from the lunchtime air-punch of ‘Soup’ to the pristine C86 melancholy of ‘Mangetout’ and ‘Something Bad’. The campfire spirals of ‘Common’ and ‘Southern Comforts’ are the sombre flipsides of the bleary-eyed-but-restless likes of ‘Jellyfish’ and ‘Reliant Robin’, while ‘Modern Industry!’ is perhaps the record’s centrepiece, a song which manages to sound both elegant and verging upon collapse.

The Dreadful Human Tangle isn’t the kind of album you can make without having lived it first. Maybe that’s true of every album, maybe it’s a bit of a hack thing to say; but that doesn’t mean it’s not true, or that this record doesn’t feel particularly organic, particularly personal, particularly worn-in. The traces – welcome and otherwise – that the last few years have left on Wyborn spread across every song like a drink soaking into a sofa. Having lived for spells in Glasgow, Brighton and the West Country, Wyborn has now been settled back in London for a while now, the city having been their most consistent home since the early 2010s. For all the emotional tumult you’ll find on the record – and there is plenty – there is a sense of steadiness and permanence which feels important to The Dreadful Human Tangle. It’s a social record, one that, though centred upon the songwriting of one person, is fundamentally shaped by a community of friends and allies. The scene, the city, is a member of Baggio too.

“This is a record about living in London in your late 20s,” says Wyborn. “It’s about the little moments that make up a life. The bits of heartbreak, the bits of sadness, the bits of joy that all come together and make up something to look back on. It’s a record made by a community of best friends, musicians and artists who’ve come together for no reasons other than love for each other and a love of making music. I turned 30 not long after we finished the album and it feels like a culmination of my 20s; stories that took me a decade to tell and feelings it took me a decade to feel.”

Like most people, Wyborn didn’t live their 20s in a neat, linear way, dominated by a single feeling, ambition or activity; life has been messier, funnier, more exciting, more boring than that. By embracing the ebbs and flows of adulthood while clinging firmly onto the few constants we all hope to be able to rely on – the love of our friends, a sense of community, a general rule that everything passes and shouldn’t be taken too seriously – Wyborn has developed a genuinely distinctive lyrical voice, which reaches its fullest realisation yet on The Dreadful Human Tangle. Each track here is rich with meaning and allusion, from snapshots of mental distress (‘Modern Industry’ – “it’s about the quicksand feeling of life”) to pandemic-era ennui (‘Jellyfish’ – “I was working from home in my freezing living room, switching between staring at the ceiling and staring at the telly”); there are sudden gut-punches of feeling (‘I Have Thought About You Every Single Second Today’ – “I was hit by this unexpected, brutal wave of grief for a relationship, almost out of nowhere”) and all-too familiar, all-too frank moments of resignation (“‘Common’ is about walking around having depression”).

Again, this is a piece of work about the small moments, the intricate details, which, when you think about it, are the bits of life we actually engage with every day; we don’t live at the macro level. But take a step back, and the constituent parts of The Dreadful Human Tangle combine in something that’s as rich, profound and expansive as anything Baggio has released so far.

“It’s a bow, it’s a full stop,” says Wyborn. “I hope people can hear it and a) paint a picture in their head of what it is to be me and b) have fun listening to it. It’s hard to be a saint in the city, it’s harder to make rent.”
credits

All songs produced, engineered and mixed by Joseph Futak (he/him)
All songs mastered by Jamie Moore (he/him)
Artwork by Lulu Bennett (she/her)
Artwork photographed by Gillies Adamson Semple (he/him)
Released by Double Dare, 2024