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Guts Club Need to Warn You About ‘Whale Legs’

The murky depths of the ocean conceal all sorts of things: monstrous and mysterious giant squid, unearthly organisms that live without oxygen, degraded petroleum products headed up the food chain. According to New Orleans-based Guts Club (a.k.a. lo-fi folk singer and video artist Lindsey Baker), there are also whales with legs, and those guys are real stuck-up assholes.

After moving from Brooklyn to New Orleans in 2015, Baker was welcomed to a tight-knit DIY scene. It was there she recorded her second album, S**t Bug, due out July 1 from upstart Moderate Fidelity Records. Baker’s latest effort as Guts Club fleshes out her Daniel Johnston-esque sound with the addition of upright bass, lap steel, and piano, all of which are heard on the titular first single.

The second taste of S**t Bug, “Whale Legs,” opens with another new instrument: a plaintive trumpet that sounds as though it abandoned an old Beirut song for life as a drunken sailor. Baker’s finger-plucked melody and the resigned creak of her voice are heavy and world-weary, but no gloom can conceal the colorful imagery of tangled seaweed, Elton John, and the aforementioned quadrupedal cetaceans. “I always longed for my own private monster to take me in and swallow me whole,” Baker confesses, daring us to root for her own destruction. Listen below, and pre-order S**t Bug here.