The Vaccines have returned with ‘Headphones Baby’, their first new music since 2018.
The release marks their first original release since 2018 single “All My Friends Are Falling In Love”, the single is the first taster of the band’s forthcoming fifth album.
“I wanna live inside your headphones baby/ I wanna live inside a world wherever you are,” Young sings on the track, which began life with the two words that make up its title written in his phone notes app. “I didn’t know what or who ‘headphones baby’ was, if it was a person or an idea,” he explained . “Before the song was written, I imagined it to be like my ‘Plug In Baby’ , but now it’s more like a concept or a feeling.”
The feeling contained in the song is one of escape, presented in a blast of classic Vaccines energy that has the power to instantly change your mood. “It’s about cocooning yourself from the outside world,” Young said. “Which is a topic I’ve always been mildly obsessed and, I suppose more broadly speaking, is probably a topic that a lot of musicians and artists are also quite obsessed with.”
‘Headphones Baby’ doesn’t quite present your typical picture of escapism though. The idea of burrowing away inside a partner’s headphones is a getaway from the tedious obligations of modern life (“Why go for beers when these people bore us?” Young sings on the first verse), but things take a surprising turn as the song continues. “I wanna die together like we’re movie stars,” the frontman fantasises. “They’ll bury us in leather in Hollywood Forever/ Don’t you wanna die together?”
The tone shifts from A to Z quite a lot in the song, but I think there is still this overarching theme of pure escapism and red button-ism, like ‘Fuck it’,” Young said. “[It’s more about] the idea of mortality – less the act of dying, but more what would come with an icon dying in a big ball of flames.”
The track – and the album it lives on – were inspired by the idea of dystopian or ‘sin cities’, and the notion of emotion as a finite resource that might one day leave us feeling empty and numb, with ‘Headphones Baby’ as the imagined antidote to that. “It’s like Roxy Music’s ‘Love Is The Drug’ and this idea that you can plug into a feeling and therefore plug out and just become overwhelmed with emotion at a time or in a place where you thought you were devoid of all that,” Young explained. “It’s essentially about wanting to feel alive. The pandemic has obviously brought new meaning to it, but I think it’s something that rang true to me pre-COVID.”
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