Babebee & blissfully – Shelter
Released on August 7, 2026, Shelter brings Babebee and blissfully together for a nine-track album that moves through dream pop, indie pop and shoegaze while retaining the genre-fluid character that has always made Babebee difficult to place inside a single musical category. Soft, hazy and deeply personal, the record uses blurred guitars and electronic textures to explore something much more tangible: the need to find a place, or a state of mind, where it finally feels safe to exist.
Babebee, pronounced “baby,” is a Korean-American singer-songwriter, producer and visual artist whose work has previously travelled through bedroom pop, electronic music, alternative rock, hyperpop and experimental pop. Originally associated with Atlanta and later based in New York, they have gradually developed an approach in which genres seem less like fixed destinations than different colours available for each new song. Their 2024 EP whatislove2u?, released through Epitaph Records, already examined love, attachment and emotional security, but Shelter takes those questions somewhere more vulnerable and introspective.
Although the album is jointly presented under the names Babebee and blissfully, Babebee is credited with writing and producing all nine songs. The record has been released independently through their own imprint, The Honeypot, and that independence feels important because Shelter is the kind of album that benefits from sounding close to the person who made it. Rather than feeling designed around a particular scene or genre, it develops according to its own emotional logic.
The album consists of “Shelter,” “Control,” “Sky,” “Believe,” “Bomi’s Lullaby,” “Chronic,” “Milo,” “When Is It Over?” and “Here We Go Again.” Freddy Baca contributes bass to several tracks, including “Control,” “Believe,” “Chronic,” “Milo” and the closing “Here We Go Again.” Across these nine songs, guitars, electronics and vocals repeatedly move in and out of focus, creating a sound that can feel intimate one moment and considerably larger the next.
The circumstances behind Shelter give the album much of its emotional weight. The songs emerged following a difficult winter during which Babebee experienced a period of depression and creative paralysis. An apparently simple decision to visit a local animal shelter unexpectedly changed that situation. Babebee began fostering two puppies, and the responsibility of caring for them disrupted the isolation and routine that had developed around that period.
One of those dogs, Milo, eventually became a permanent part of Babebee’s life and also appears in the album’s tracklist. It is a small detail, but it changes the way the entire record can be understood. Shelter is not simply about finding somewhere to hide from difficult experiences. It is also about responsibility, companionship and the strange ways in which caring for another living thing can pull somebody back into their own life.
The word “shelter” consequently carries several meanings throughout the record. It can describe physical protection, emotional safety or the comforting presence of another person, but it can also become something less healthy. Safety can turn into isolation, and dependence on another person can gradually become a form of control. Much of the album seems to exist within that uncomfortable territory, where the desire to feel protected begins to collide with the need to recover personal independence.
That tension gives the title track its emotional foundation. The idea of another person's mind becoming a refuge initially sounds romantic, yet Shelter repeatedly questions what happens when one person becomes responsible for another person's entire sense of security. The album gradually shifts away from the idea that safety must be provided by somebody else and begins searching for something more internal and sustainable.
“Control,” which appeared as a single in May 2026, approaches the darker side of that process more directly. The song deals with the aftermath of manipulation and with the confusion that remains when somebody else's behaviour has altered the way you understand yourself. The surrounding dream-pop and shoegaze textures make that emotional instability feel almost physical, with sounds appearing close enough to touch before retreating again into the mix.
“Believe” carries a different kind of contradiction. Anger and disappointment remain present, but they coexist with a refusal to abandon the possibility of love altogether. That balance is important to Shelter, because the record rarely presents healing as a simple progression from pain toward happiness. Feelings overlap, old patterns return and moments of clarity can disappear almost as quickly as they arrive.
“Chronic” pushes further into that sense of emotional exhaustion. Its title alone suggests something that refuses to disappear completely, and the song treats pain less as a dramatic event than as something capable of becoming part of everyday existence. Within the hazier production of the album, that persistence becomes particularly effective. The emotion does not need to announce itself loudly because it is already embedded in the atmosphere.
“Milo” introduces another kind of intimacy. Knowing the circumstances behind the song gives it a warmth that changes the temperature of the record. The relationship between human and animal becomes part of the album's wider exploration of connection, but without the emotional negotiations that complicate its human relationships. Sometimes shelter can simply mean having another creature waiting for you.
The scope widens again with “When Is It Over?”, where anxiety no longer appears limited to personal relationships. The outside world itself begins to feel unstable and threatening. This is where Shelter becomes especially interesting as a title, because the need for refuge starts to extend beyond individual heartbreak. There is a broader exhaustion here, the feeling of living in circumstances where withdrawing from everything can occasionally appear easier than trying to understand what is happening outside.
The closing “Here We Go Again” brings many of these ideas together. The title acknowledges repetition before the song has even begun, suggesting familiar emotional patterns returning once more. Yet there is also an important change in perspective. Recognising that something is happening again is already different from experiencing it without understanding it. What initially appears to be another ending can therefore contain the possibility of starting differently.
Musically, Shelter works particularly well because Babebee does not approach shoegaze as a historical style that needs to be carefully reproduced. The genre becomes one ingredient within a much broader vocabulary. There are blurred guitars, waves of distortion and voices that occasionally seem to dissolve into their surroundings, but there is also the directness of indie pop and the flexibility of electronic production.
This makes the album feel less nostalgic than its dream-pop and shoegaze references might initially suggest. The haze serves the emotional content rather than becoming the entire purpose of the music. When the songs need intimacy, the production can become delicate and close; when those emotions become overwhelming, the surrounding sound can expand with them.
There is something particularly appropriate about making an album concerned with safety using music in which boundaries are constantly blurred. Guitars merge with electronics, voices become part of the atmosphere and individual sounds sometimes lose their edges entirely. The production creates a space that feels protective without ever becoming completely secure.
What ultimately makes Shelter compelling is that Babebee does not present recovery as a grand moment of revelation. The album is more interested in the smaller processes through which somebody begins to return to themselves. A dog needs feeding. A song finally gets written. An unhealthy relationship is recognised for what it was. Another morning arrives. Gradually, what once felt like isolation can begin to resemble solitude, and solitude can eventually become somewhere from which to rebuild.
That is why Shelter feels like an appropriate title for the record. A shelter can protect you from the world, but you cannot necessarily remain inside it forever. Across these nine songs, Babebee seems to be learning the difference between hiding and healing, between being protected and being controlled, and between asking another person to provide safety and slowly constructing it within yourself.
Released through The Honeypot on August 7, Shelter represents another intriguing turn in Babebee’s constantly changing musical language. Dream pop, indie pop, shoegaze, alternative rock and electronic textures all drift through the album, but none of those labels completely explains it. Beneath the haze is something much simpler and more human: a record about trying to feel safe again, and discovering that sometimes the first step back toward the world arrives on four paws.
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