Becky And The Birds Share New Song 'I Made My Baby Cry'

Swedish musician Thea Gustafsson – who writes, records, and produces under the moniker Becky and the Birds – has recently turned a new leaf, entering an era of creative freedom and emotional release with the announcement of her forthcoming self-produced debut album, Only Music Makes Me Cry Now, due for release on 15 November.

In celebration of the record’s announcement, Gustafsson has also shared a new track entitled ‘I made my baby cry’, a gorgeous post-breakup lament that swells with emotional catharsis that arrives alongside an accompanying visualizer, made by Gustafsson. Meshing delicate keys and stirring strings with a soaring choir of the songwriter’s own pitched, layered, and manipulated vocals, the huge-sounding self-made symphony highlights her effortless command of the studio. As Gustafsson explained: “I wrote this song after a breakup. To me breakups are the worst, seeing the other people die inside, knowing that you caused that death.”

Earlier this year, Gustaffson shared the first cut off Only Music Makes Me Cry Now, an ethereal and intimate track entitled ‘When she holds me’. This summer, she additionally began hosting a regular residency on Foundation FM radio, in anticipation of live dates to be announced.

Thea Gustafsson — who kickstarted her musical career as Becky and the Birds in 2016 after taking on production with sheer self-determination and a vision — began laying the groundwork for her upcoming album, Only Music Makes Me Cry Now, in 2021. At that time, her creative process was largely informed by a wide array of sources, including: insight from past collaborations with Dijon, Seinabo Sey, and Lapsley; obscure Bandcamp deep-dives; visits to live sets at clubs and dive bars across her two homes at that time, London and her native Stockholm; a variety of media fixations (including Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, and Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth); and the crushing vortex of emotions she had been encountering in the aftermath of a life-altering breakup. During that time, she needed to “let it all out to take it all in,” motivating her to return to the studio as a means to wipe the slate completely clean and fully process everything she was experiencing. The songs she crafted during this period, which later became OMMMCN, therefore allow listeners to follow her through that time of intense healing, with the record’s exploratory, desperate, passionate, romantic, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable lyrical backbone supported by a varied collection of sampled audio-bites from her everyday life (from old demos and phone recordings to natural city noise).

About Becky and the Birds

Thea Gustafsson is a disciplined person by nature, with her formal musical education at Musikmakarna Songwriters Academy of Sweden and avid violin-playing as a child inspiring her unending need for perfectionism. Armed with the skills of pop songcraft and production, Becky and the Birds came to life in 2016 in reaction to frustrating and fruitless encounters with male producers and songwriters, which took form in 2018’s self-released EP Becky and the Birds. With the release of her debut 4AD EP, Trasslig, in 2020, Gustafsson used Becky and the Birds as an outlet for songs about complex women – strong, independent, sensitive and romantic women that are both powerful and vulnerable at the same time and who are ‘trasslig’ (Swedish for ‘entangled, messy, intricate’).

Following this, Gustafsson was nominated in the Breakthrough of the Year category at the Swedish Music Publishers Association Awards, the equivalent of the GRAMMYs for songwriters and composers in Sweden. She has also collaborated with the likes of Dijon, Seinabo Sey, and Lapsley, among others, and in 2021, Gustafsson then released the single ‘With You’ as an exclusive for Spotify’s Studio Oyster.

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