Over the past few years, Malibu (real name Barbara Braccini) has become a rising star in the contemporary ambient and electronic worlds. Between her widely loved NTS show United in Flames, which has featured guests such as ML Buch, Evian Christ, and Julianna Barwick, and her tours alongside Oklou, the French artist has steadily built a devoted audience. Her earlier releases, including One Life, Palaces of Pity and 2024’s Essential Mixtape with Merely, showcased the atmospheric and emotional depth that she is now ready to fully explore on her first album.
Her debut, Vanities, arrives on October 3 via YEAR0001. Written largely over two years in Stockholm, where she lives, the 13-track record reflects on cities as landscapes of both beauty and loneliness, with Malibu weaving together soundscapes that are as dreamlike as they are grounded. Alongside the announcement, she shared a short text that drifts between imagery of sea, waves, corridors, and twilight drives:
The sea brought small treasures back to the shore that The Girl scours every day. She finds little things buried in the wet sand, she fills her pockets with them and walks back home. She lays the little treasures around the house.
She wanders around, from one room to the other ; one is dark and cold. The AC works but the light doesn’t when she flicks the switch. The sun that hits the electric blinds hardly penetrates the room, the light dances on the walls, predictable yet never the same. The Girl likes the corridor, it is narrow and she likes the sound of her heels on the hardwood floor. Between two doors, a painting, too small, loosely framed ; waves are distinguishable, and in the horizon the glow of the birth of a sun, or its death. Whatever.
When the night comes she roams around the city in her Chevrolet, the cream leather seats are warm and she gets dizzy in the winding roads. She stops and looks over the valley slowly lighting up in the dusk, —a silent watcher.
I am one of those that are invisible, with a window down maybe, part of this undefined symphony of cars that come and go. Teenagers roll-by, fast, loud, —and we all look at the same sky, the same planes landing and taking-off, the same lights blinking on the tops of downtown, the same corridors of taillights, the same trees that block the view. We sit and fantasize a thousand lives, in the blaring.
To mark the news, Malibu has also unveiled a new single, “So Sweet & Willing.” Following the release of “Spicy City,” it offers another glimpse into the textures and moods of Vanities, a tender and immersive piece that captures her gift for crafting sonic worlds that feel as confidential as they are infinite.
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