Babygirl - Stay Here Where It's Warm

“Downright dreamy music” – Rolling Stone

Stay Here Where It’s Warm is the long-awaited debut album from Toronto band Babygirl. Meticulously built and carefully shaped, it’s a warm, gently devastating record about fleeting intimacy, emotional refuge, and learning to let go. Babygirl — Kiki Frances and Cameron Bright — are placing a refreshing spin on youth nostalgia with a contemporary edge, thanks to fuzzy guitar riffs and sincere lyrics. Spotlit upon the album’s release is the captivating track “Dancing With Her,” an emotionally raw tune dappled in sparkles of bright light. You don’t know how bad the bruise is til you’re pressing down, Frances sings. A reminder that joy and pain live in the same place, a sort of mutualism that binds the emotional poles of the album. On Stay Here Where It’s Warm, that ache of something lost doesn’t cancel out the beauty of having once had it.

Each song across Stay Here Where It’s Warm puts a slightly different lens on what it means to stay, or leave, or want to. “All Is Well” floats on a quiet existentialism, its lyrics reaching for comfort in the cosmos: And when it’s not enough for me / I’ll turn my head and see infinity, Frances sings, endlessness contained in that refrain. “Give Up With Me” leans harder into ‘90s shoegaze—heavy, gorgeous, distorted—in service of surrender. On “Buzzed,” the haze lifts, if only for a second. A sticky, dizzy love song with the feel of a sugar rush, it’s all color and motion: It’s like somebody spiked the punch.

The oldest song on Stay Here Where It’s Warm dates back to the time of their initial EPs: Be Still My Heart in 2023, Losers Weepers in 2021, and Lovers Fevers in 2018, which together have amassed over 50 million streams. “Take Me Back” started as an attempt to enter the “pantheon of apology songs”—inspired by classics “I Want You Back,” “Sorry,” and “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg”—before evolving into a bittersweet dream-pop gem. Another, “You Don’t Need a Reason to Call,” spent years in the vault before the band figured out how to camouflage its stadium-sized pop chorus.

These are songs that have followed them, stayed percolating, or, as Babygirl put it, “keep tapping on our shoulders.” It’s a record that’s been simmering quietly while the band wrote, scrapped, rewrote, pored over every tiny detail. “Sometimes it feels like you’re making a pointillist painting and you’re just seeing the dots,” they say, “and then at the end you stand back” to see the world they’ve built. They call themselves “studio rats”—this album marks a step into the light.

“The chorus soars out from the shadows of nostalgia of melancholic recollections of moments with someone who redefined what love can be and into the bright burst of luminosity that saturates the single’s accompanying artwork, with open chords and twinkling synths swirling like dust in a sunbeam: “Caught me in your headlights, I forgot to move.” – Exclaim! on “After You”

“While their nostalgic sound recalls the warm malaise of ’90s alternative rock, the band’s lyrics strike a contemporary chord, blending sad, solitary images with moments of crystalline clarity and emotional weight.” – CONSEQUENCE

“Bandmates Kiki Frances and Cameron Bright layer on the melancholic yearning, jangling guitars, and haze ‘90s vibes, hitting on a deft balance of earnest pop melody and indie rock malaise.” – Under The Radar