Sexy. Crunchy. Electro. Big and muscly. This about sums up the next act of pop’s beefy enfant terrible, Babymorocco. The Bournemouth-born himbo has made quite a splash in the electronic avant-garde this past year, enticing the likes of Jockstrap, The Dare and more into his sordid world of oil-smothered thirst traps and cheeky beats. Now, he promises even more debauchery on debut album ‘Amour’, giving us a peek behind the well-glossed veneer of a star on the rise.
The singer joins NME on Zoom having just returned from Los Angeles, where he recently wrapped the video for his latest single ‘Body Organic Disco Electronic’ – a title surely plucked straight from the lips of ‘The Fame’-era Lady Gaga. “We’re having this sexy, emotional time, getting beat up,” he teases of the twisted romp, which takes place inside an army barracks alongside two other Babymoroccos.
This isn’t the only battering he’s taken of late, either. A recent video for ‘Babestation’ depicts the singer at the mercy of a blood-thirsty, homicidal volleyball team, while ‘Bikinis & Trackies’ (directed by frequent collaborator Iris Luz) descends into a feverish delirium upon being hijacked by a gun-toting debt collector. It would seem the ‘Amour’ album rollout has something against the Babymorocco we know and love.
Of course, this is all a larger ploy on the side of the artist, whose penchant for shock performances can be traced back to art school. “I make it so that people can feel good talking shit about me. If you want to shoot me, kill me, rip my clothes off – you can do all that,” he grins. His critics would certainly love a chance to tick off the above; recently, the singer was forced to come out in a now-deleted post after being lobbed with fairly baseless allegations of queerbaiting thanks to his salacious online presence.
Can’t a guy just love short-shorts and flexing a bit of flesh anymore? Is irony completely dead? Are we entering an era of complete online prurience – perhaps even a war on being sexy? “A thousand fucking percent,” Babymorocco confirms, speaking emphatically on the latter. Pointing to the growing Trad movement across platforms like TikTok and X, “we’re now getting people who literally have never left their house, are just constantly online, and wouldn’t know what sex is if it hit them in the face.”
Though discourse around the singer’s sexuality is a symptom of a burgeoning, sexually conservative movement, Babymorocco still refrains from judging whatever’s going on in his detractors’ bedrooms. “Everyone has sex in their own way,” he reasons. “Just don’t try and stop my swag if I’m not stopping yours.”
As Babymorocco’s first full-length project after 2023 EP ‘The Sound’, ‘Amour’ fashions itself as a gushing ode to the scuzziness of French electronic music. The album makes good on the tension between these two isles by introducing a new alias, Jean Paul, as the queerer foil to our hyper-masculine Brit-sleazeball: “I really wanted to emphasise the Francophile vs the British boy of ‘Bikinis and Trackies.’” Getting into character for the former involved countless hours studying the moves of tecktonic dancers, a style of freewheeling body-rocking that perfectly compliments the jerky sonics of France’s electro scene, while also brushing up on some classic French experimental cinema (like Gaspar Noe’s erotic arthouse romp Love).
“Pop music is a beautiful genre. It’s almost biblical to me”
At 15 tracks, ‘Amour’ is Babymorocco’s longest effort yet: a chance to indulge all strains of his artistry, from the U14 ravegoer obsessed with the sounds of clubland (‘Really Hot’/‘Ear Acherrr’) to modern affinities with the golden era of Ed Banger Records (‘Elle Aime’). The only brief was to create sounds he would actually dance to. “Pop music is a beautiful genre. It’s almost biblical to me,” says Babymorocco, citing Aqua’s genre-blending debut ‘Aquarium’ and the addictive hooks of Janet Jackson, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera as foundational texts.
“I think people sleep on pop as this very easy thing to write and communicate, to make a song that feels like it means something, but making it super condensed and catchy is the hardest thing in the world. I have every respect for it,” he adds. “Then you’ve got music that’s too catchy, which I want to shoot in the face, because I don’t think it means anything.”
Along with experimental pop-duo Frost Children, who served as executive producers, Babymorocco achieved one of his biggest coups: a writing session with Xenomania’s Miranda Cooper (Girls Aloud, Pet Shop Boys, Kylie Minogue). The two collaborated on ‘No Cameo’, a classic EDM banger that doubles as the album’s final titillation. Babymorocco’s scratchy, manipulated vocals are defiant here – “Feel so good with my body out, you’ll be leaving tonight with my name in your mouth” – brimming with cheekiness and self-belief. It’s one of many surprisingly tender moments in the project, a reminder of the humanity that lurks beneath the cocksure provocateur.
Then, a particularly surprising admission emerges around the album’s chaotic first single ‘Crazy Cheap’, which almost didn’t make the cut at all. “It’s one of the most emotional songs in terms of how broke I actually am at that point,” says Babymorocco. “Like, walking up to a video that Converse paid £10,000 for, and I’ve got no money to eat.”
Originally intended for a stand-alone release, Babymorocco felt it to be striking in its honesty, a benchmark of his perseverance in the big chess match of his career so far. “I always want that to be a big element of my music – that I’m making this shit fucking poor – I made this whole album with these beautiful videos,” he continues. “I live my life in a grown way, but I’m broke.”
Such “penniless decadence”, as he later terms it, is part and parcel of the Babymorocco experience: the toil and reward of committing to your art, no matter how difficult it gets. “I’m so focused on this creation of where I can push my career. It’s suffocating, but I’m obsessed with it,” he says. “I want to push it to the absolute extreme.” Now that’s ‘Amour’-e…
Babymorocco’s ‘Amour’ is out now via True Panther Records