There’s a particular clarity that arrives when you don’t know whether you’ll survive the next ten seconds. As Julia Bailen watched an out-of-control vehicle careen towards her car, she made an important decision: “If I survive this, I can’t quit the band.” Miraculously, the guitarist/vocalist for the New York indie rock sibling trio BAILEN and her parents survived the 65 mile an hour impact unscathed. And in the aftermath, Julia felt oddly normal, unfazed. When the paramedic started filling out forms after the wreck, he interrupted her attempt to spell her last name. “You’re in a band, right?” he asked. “I listen to your music all the time. I love your band.” David smirks as Julia recounts this story with a brotherly quip: “Are you sure you hadn’t just hit your head and assumed he wanted your autograph?” The latest album from Julia and her twin brothers David and Daniel, SWIM!!! (due September 25th) springs from that near-death experience and the absurdity of the situation with a euphoric newfound “fuck it” mentality.
SWIM!!! also marks BAILEN’s first independent release, was produced by the band, and represents the end of a songwriting malaise Julia had been experiencing since the group’s last album, 2023’s sublime Tired Hearts. The very night of the crash, she wrote the verses to the title track “SWIM!!!” on a busted up guitar that, along with their Dad’s 18th century cello, made it out of the crash mostly in tune. That song eventually became the gravitational core of the record, an anthem of independence and resilience.
Raised in New York City by two freelance classical musicians, Bailen siblings Daniel, David, and Julia absorbed everything from chamber music to intricate folk guitar at home, not to mention the countless genres and styles echoing through the streets atop the city’s grit and grind. Proudly self-declared the “scrappiest band you’ll meet,” the Bailens do it all: David mixed and engineered the record, Daniel produced and wrote the string arrangements, and Julia was the mind behind all the creative direction. Recorded between their parents’ home, their grandfather’s Connecticut basement, and a couple of abandoned churches, SWIM!!! balances intense emotion with tender wit as it insists to never let the tide take you away.
The album’s title track embodies the newfound self-reliance that comes with going independent, framing the turning point as the end of a relationship. Julia takes the lead to deliver an anthemic chorus of empowerment: “”So burn that bridge/ Say fuck it I know how to swim/ Yeah I’m lucky I know how to live without you/ I’ve done it before.” Complete with soaring harmonies, slow-swaying rhythm, and limber guitar plucking, the lead single somehow feels both intimate and epic, fusing elements of arena-ready sing-along, pop-punk flair, and folk-rock honesty.
That eclectic mix of genre and influences on SWIM!!! comes together in a sound that is quintessentially BAILEN. “We’re related, but our voices are pretty distinct as singers and as writers,” David says. “We pull from our individual and shared experiences growing up together and we blend it together in harmony in a unique way. That is BAILEN.”
The trio’s collaborative chemistry has led to an impressive catalog, dating back to BAILEN’s John Congleton-produced and critically acclaimed Thrilled to Be Here. The album was lauded as an “impressive debut” by Rolling Stone, comparing the band to CSN, Fleetwood Mac, TLC and Haim. Their resume also features a wide range of achievements, including a top 10 Billboard Adult Alternative hit, TV soundtrack placements on Sons of Anarchy and Looking for Alaska, and the 2019 single “Something Tells Me” being listed as one of the best of the year by NPR and best of the decade by Spotify. BAILEN have appeared on CBS This Morning, The Today Show, and Dermot O’Leary’s Radio 2 show and The One Show on the BBC. The trio’s beloved live performances have led to sold out headlined national and European tours and collaborations with artists such as Hozier, Amos Lee, Grace Potter, Jonathan Batiste, and even Burt Bacharach.
It wasn’t just the critics listening, either. BAILEN has amassed a following of fans eager to help out, from one musician-turned-museum executive-turned-entrepreneur fan offering to lend the band some rare 1970s pre-amps for the record to another letting them use a vacant Pennsylvania estate to film the title track’s music video. BAILEN’s devoted grass roots following has become a part of their extended family. “Every show is like a reunion,” Daniel jokes. “I spend the hour after each show catching up like old times while David and Julia pack up.”
The Bailen bond thrives in cracking open the hardest moments and fusing the pieces back together with a contagious hopefulness. Second single “Kansas Tornado” was recorded with longtime friend Lee Falco, owner of beloved Hudson Valley music club The Falcon and proprietor of church-turned-studio The Building. The setting lends the track an almost devotional intimacy, the Bailens gathering around a single microphone to sing together, every harmony crackling with warm vulnerability as Julia and Daniel’s duo fingerpicked acoustic guitars lace around them like a generational quilt. “We tracked this live with David tapping his foot in the isolation booth, playing a tennis racket as a percussion instrument while Daniel and I played facing each other with two guitars in the main room.” Julia recounts. “It’s such a specific sound because Daniel is playing it in G fingerings and I’m playing with a capo in C fingerings. This is a little trick we learned playing with our Dad. I love the sound.“ Daniel took lead on writing the track. “It’s about when someone appears suddenly in your life, shakes you up, and turns everything upside down and sideways,” he says. “Sometimes you can’t help but let them carry you away.” Like so much of SWIM!!!, the song finds beauty by meeting pandemonium with empathy, harmony, and the quiet confidence that comes from never facing it alone.
Another meaningful collaborator for the album was Jake Sinclair, a musician/producer whose long list of credits include Weezer, Fall Out Boy!, and Panic at the Disco. And akin to Falco, Sinclair decided that the solution to aiding the massive scope of BAILEN’s sound was bringing them to an abandoned church to get a“Godlier” drum sound. “We rolled these crates of gear through the streets of New York 10 blocks to this church near Gramercy Park,” David recalls with a laugh, followed by a wisecrack. “I guess we have a thing for playing in churches even though we’re three New York Jews. We’re in it for the jokes, anyways, so maybe the irony is fitting.”
But SWIM!!! never lets wit stand in for conviction. If David’s joke about the siblings’ heritage invites a smile, the stunning “In My Name” reminds listeners that identity is rarely linear. Built on slow-burning guitar, skittering grooves, and one of the album’s most arresting vocal performances, the song finds Julia grappling with the painful complexity of being Jewish in America at this moment in time. “We wrote and recorded the song while the Columbia protests against the violence in Gaza were happening literally outside our window,” she says. “You can even hear the helicopters and sirens in some of the vocal takes. We were really at the epicenter of the conversation, and the song is our response. It’s about standing up to powerful men who justify horrible violence and war in your name.”
Elsewhere, album highlight “Send Me Off” floats through a kaleidoscope of psychedelic pop, David’s effortlessly soulful falsetto dancing over snappy bass and wordless harmonies like a vintage R&B star. The swaggering “Eve Babitz,” on which the band collaborated with producer Devon Hoffman (Lorde), channels the sun-soaked cool of HAIM through crunchy indie pop riffs and lux production.
“A phrase that we have returned to many times has been ‘even at the end of the world there will still be beautiful days,’ and this record is really our way of finding those days,” Julia says. There’s a reason SWIM!!! feels so alive. It’s built on those moments of clarity and euphoria that follow a crash—both figurative and literal. “We all have strong opinions about things, and when we disagree, we disagree fiercely,” Julia says. “But we’re always committed to figuring it out. We’ll just keep trying different things. I’ll come in with a song, Daniel will add a verse, David will work on the chorus. We keep going until it feels good.” David concurs, calling the record a healing experience. “We weren’t making music that we expected to be scrutinized or curated. We just wanted every song to work in the room,” he adds. “We sat in our grandparents’ basement, faced each other, and figured out each of these songs in the room: bass, drums, and guitar. Bare bones.” That’s the quiet miracle at the heart of BAILEN: three distinct voices, each powerful on its own but endlessly reshaping one another at the same time. It’s the Bailens’ humor and hopefulness, sewn into the tapestry of this record, that takes you on a journey with them as they face the world. Like Julia’s busted up guitar in the wrecked car that still had a song left in it, SWIM!!! reminds us that the strongest things are the ones that refuse to be broken.
