No Label, No Lifeguard, BAILEN Go Their Own Way on SWIM!!!
The New York sibling trio BAILEN made SWIM!!! entirely on their own terms, and it sounds like a band that survived something
In November 2024, Julia Bailen was riding with her parents on I-95 when another driver hit them at around sixty-five miles an hour and fled. The car was totaled. Everyone lived. Her father's eighteenth-century cello came out of the wreck still in tune. One of the band's guitars did not fare as well. Julia picked up that damaged guitar and started writing a song on it. The song became "SWIM!!!", and now it is the title track of the new BAILEN album, out today.
That story, reported by Atwood Magazine around the release of the second single in August, sets the mood for the whole record. SWIM!!! is the sound of a band deciding what matters and cutting the rest.
A Family Business
BAILEN is Julia Bailen and her twin brothers, David and Daniel. They grew up in New York, the children of two freelance classical musicians, in a home where chamber music and intricate folk guitar were simply part of daily life. They have been a band for about ten years now and have played more than a thousand shows. SWIM!!! is their third album. As the Madison weekly Isthmus put it, the 2019 debut, Thrilled to Be Here, was big anthemic folk-pop, while 2023's Tired Hearts moved into synth-pop with some hard-hitting beats.
SWIM!!! is something else again. It is their first fully independent release, ten songs with no label in the middle. According to FEMMUSIC, the siblings funded it and did their own writing, production, engineering, and mixing. David did the mixing, Julia told the Substack newsletter To Be Frank, which put a lot of the final calls in his hands.
The appeal of the band has always been the blend. Three people with the same last name and very different instincts, singing close enough that the seams disappear. David put it plainly to FEMMUSIC.
"We're related, but our voices are pretty distinct as singers and as writers," David Bailen told FEMMUSIC.
He went on to describe the result as a mix of shared and separate experience, folded together in harmony. That is the whole trick. Nobody in this band sounds like a backup singer.
Cut Live, Partly in Churches
The recording process, as the band has described it in interviews, favored the room over the grid. David told Atwood that going back to tracking live felt like a return to form. Atwood reports that "Kansas Tornado" was recorded with their friend Lee Falco at The Building, his studio in a converted Hudson Valley church. In her To Be Frank interview, Julia described a second church, in Gramercy, where the band re-tracked the basic parts of the title track with their friend Jake Sinclair after he felt the drums needed to hit harder. David added that recording most of the songs in one space kept the album's tone from wandering.
"Kansas Tornado" is the clearest picture of that method. The three of them gathered around a single microphone and sang it together, so the harmony you hear is the harmony that happened in the air. In comments published by Atwood, Daniel said the song is about surrendering to something bigger than yourself. It is a folk ballad, patient and warm, and it sits right next to the brash rush of the title track without any awkwardness.
Other songs travel further. "Send Me Off" drifts into psychedelic dream-pop. "Eve Babitz" arrives today with a video shot in director Celine Sutter's apartment, where the band built a photo booth set. The range is wide, and the band knows it. Julia told To Be Frank that the three of them write so differently that fitting the songs together became a puzzle.
One song fought back. "This Is It" started out rootsy and heavy on guitar, and the band struggled with it. The breakthrough, Julia said, came when they tried muting the guitars on the chorus just to see what would happen. Sometimes the answer is subtraction.
Sometimes the answer is subtraction.
Made for Rooms, Not Feeds
There is a thread running through everything the band has said about this era. They want it to feel physical. Julia told Atwood that her goal for this era is to have real experiences with people and keep things "as IRL as possible." Daniel contrasted the community the band has built over more than a thousand shows with the world of clicks and algorithms. Julia also told To Be Frank that the priority in the studio was to think about other people as little as possible. That sounds like a contradiction, but it is not. The idea is to make it for the people in the room, not for the imagined listener scrolling past.
That makes the live dates the real point. BAILEN are out on the SWIM!!! At Your Own Risk Tour, which was booked into Madison, Wisconsin, and Evanston, Illinois, in mid-September. The New York stops come later. They play The Falcon in Marlboro, New York, on Saturday, October 17. Then they come home to Brooklyn for a show at National Sawdust on Wednesday, November 11, both listed on the venues' own sites.
National Sawdust feels like a fitting place for this band to land. BAILEN are, at heart, the children of two classical players, and they have made a record meant to be heard in a room where people actually listen. A November night in Brooklyn, three siblings at the microphones, a record they made themselves. For another story about New Yorkers making music in sacred spaces, read about the choir loft sessions.
Independence is a risk for any band ten years in. It usually means no advance, a smaller push, and no one else to blame. BAILEN seem to have decided that the bigger risk was sounding like somebody else. The title has three exclamation points for a reason. Swimming is what you do when the ground gives way.
