Q&A: Inside Baby Jane’s Haunting New World of ‘Winter Forever’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
David Nikolic
BABY JANE FINDS FREEDOM IN SURRENDER — On her upcoming sophomore album Winter Forever, arriving Friday, July 10, independent electronic artist Baby Jane invites listeners into her realm suspended between darkness and transcendence. The record follows a spirit moving through nihilism, loneliness, and emotional desolation before discovering freedom through surrender, to rhythm, movement and complete immersion in sound.
What began as an album about isolation became something entirely different during its creation. “An album that I started with the intention of expressing loneliness morphed into an album of escape and personal freedom,” Baby Jane says.
That transformation shapes the foundation of Winter Forever. Rather than remaining trapped in darkness, the album documents a search for release. Across its ethereal soundscapes and driving electronic rhythms, Baby Jane examines how movement itself can become a form of liberation.
Drawing influence from Russian pop classics and the internet's bedroom hardstyle underground, the songstress manifests a sound that exists outside traditional genre boundaries. Her work blends trance, synthwave, and angelcore aesthetics into something uniquely her own—at once delicate and intense, nostalgic and futuristic.
The album's world extends beyond the music. Throughout Winter Forever, Baby Jane builds a visual landscape filled with occult imagery, pagan symbolism, surrealist horror, abandoned concrete structures, pixelated video games and empty rural fields.
That atmosphere is captured perfectly on “Midnight Highway,” the latest single from the record.
“I wrote it about one romantic night with someone you can't forget,” Baby Jane says. “The beat makes me feel like I'm seeing diamonds shimmering in the dark.”
Its accompanying music video expands the album's visual mythology. Inspired by the atmospheric worlds of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, the video embraces fog-covered streets, industrial decay, and eerie digital environments.
Throughout Winter Forever, contradictions remain central to the experience. The album balances sadness with freedom, isolation with connection, and escapism with self-acceptance. Rather than resolving those tensions, Baby Jane allows them to exist side by side.
Winter Forever thrives in paradox. Introversion and escapism. Sadness and liberation. Isolation and transcendence. Baby Jane does not escape the cold. She makes it sacred.
David Nikolic
LUNA: Welcome back and thank you for talking to Luna again. It's super exciting to have you back since the last time we talked before A Grave Marked Strange was released. I would love to catch up and see how life has been treating you and what have you been up to since the last time we talked.
BABY JANE: Life has blessed me to become a full-time musician, so I'm putting all of my energy and my love and passion into that. It's been great. It's been a beautiful materialization of a lot of ideas that I've had for a very long time, and the seating of many new ones.
LUNA: Your newest single, “Midnight Highway,” continues to push and expand the boundaries of your sound in such an emotionally immersive way. What initially inspired the creation of the track, and what ideas, emotions, or experiences were you channeling while bringing it to life?
BABY JANE: My producer and I wanted to explore slower tempos and a deeper register in my voice, because for many months we were piggybacking off of the success of “Eternal Embrace,” and this was me 180-ing that. He made this beat. I was very inspired by it. I thought it sounded very refined. It immediately made me feel like driving. It gave me this vibe of being on Ocean Boulevard or Ocean Drive in Miami, and I had just gone there to play a gig, and I had a really awesome experience there. I was recounting the memory of that, and we teased it and got some love online, and just decided to drop it.
LUNA: “Midnight Highway” is accompanied by a music video. What was it like building the visual world around this single and how was your experience filming it?
BABY JANE: It’s probably one of the most simple music videos that I've put together. I just really wanted the movement of being in a car on a highway. That's pretty at face value, and then I just had this idea, because I was binging a bunch of James Spader movies to do the Secretary BDSM arm bar, so I think that's probably the most interesting element in the videos that I'm wearing the bar from Secretary. My videos never make sense, it's just vignettes, and then you pull the sense afterwards.
LUNA: You’re about to release your sophomore album Winter Forever — huge congratulations are in order. The record explores themes of breaking free from nihilism, emotional surrender, and ultimately finding liberation through movement, rhythm, and self-release. Going into this album cycle, what emotions, experiences, or internal conflicts did you feel most compelled to unpack and explore creatively this time around?
BABY JANE: Winter Forever started writing itself as soon as I came back from Germany and Prague, which was the last conversation that we had. I already know what the next album is going to be before I finish the one that I'm currently working on, and that's how I know it's done.
Right now, I know that I knew that this album was done, because I already know what the next one's going to be. The album was supposed to be an embodiment of my cynicism about romance and this eternal void of loneliness that I feel like I have. It was supposed to be a nod to the brutalism and sadness of the Soviet communism that my family grew up in and draw the parallels. Being in Berlin changed that. I wrote this song called “One Night in Berlin,” and that pivoted the entire album to something a lot more hopeful and something a lot more joyful with respect to experiencing music, and how music, as a receiver of it, and as a DJ, as somebody who gives it to people, can be a portal out of the loneliness and some kind of communal catharsis of it. The album is turned into something much more positive, beautiful and free. The concept that I had of it when I started it was overshadowed by the joy that I felt making it.
LUNA: Last time we spoke about A Grave Marked Strange, you described the creative process as a deeply spiritual endeavor — allowing space for God and the unknown to guide the work rather than approaching it too cerebrally. With Winter Forever, how did you spiritually prepare yourself entering this era? Did your rituals, routines, or relationship to creativity evolve at all during the making of this record, and how spiritual did this process ultimately become for you?
BABY JANE: No, actually, it became a lot more shallow. I do this thing where I keep saying I have writer's block and I need a muse, and I have writer's block, and I can't write, and then, while I'm having the writer's block, I'll write the songs. But then I'll write the real song that I'm trying to write. I think I wrote this album in denial. Nobody cares if you approach it with all of this intellectual weight, they don't care. It's just about enjoying the music and sharing the music. In the most simple phrasing, it wasn't that deep. I did struggle over the songs as I always do, but I didn't like maul and decided that this was going to be the song. I didn't decide that they're great songs, I just wrote the best songs that I could and put them together in a pile of music.
LUNA: Did you take any creative risks or experiment with new approaches on Winter Forever compared to A Grave Marked Strange? What felt different this time around in how you expressed yourself?
BABY JANE: Absolutely. I feel like A Grave Marked Strange prepared me to use myself as a reference, because I feel like there's so many ideas that we were working with, so many ideas that we were toying with on A Grave Marked Strange that were in its infancy, for example, like the hard style mixed with the witch house, it was all in early stages, and then still tethered to the current times and the ecosystem that I exist in as an artist right now. This album feels like a much more mature version of just the Baby Jane sound, and so it was much easier to see the ideas through from the root to the fruit, because we had so much experience living in this sonic world. In being comfortable in the Baby Jane sonic world, and what it's become, and how it's become its own thing, it was easier to grow branches from that.
LUNA: Do you have a personal favorite song on Winter Forever— one that feels closest to your heart or most revealing of who Baby Jane is right now?
BABY JANE: “One Night in Berlin” is one of the songs that I'm very proud of so far in my discography. I just feel like lyrically, that song is really well put together.
LUNA: What do you hope your coven feels when they enter the world of Winter Forever for the first time?
BABY JANE: I hope that they feel like they're listening to something that is completely fresh and different, and I hope that it opens their doors of what dance music and underground indie dance music can be. I hope that it feels new for them.
LUNA: How do you hope coven — especially your femme audience — can connect with or find power in this new era of music from you? What emotions or messages do you want to leave with them?
BABY JANE: I hope that my personal sense of empowerment and feminism and independence that I have as a person shines through through my lyrics. I hope that they feel free. I hope that they feel like they can surrender to music, they can surrender to life, they could stand on their own two feet, and go anywhere, and travel anywhere, and just be completely independent of anybody else's validation and enjoy life that way. I hope that sheds through my lyrics.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like for you that you would like to share with Luna?
BABY JANE: I’m feeling great. I hope that I rest a little bit, but I probably won't. I hope that I play a lot more shows. To anybody who's reading this interview, I just wanted to say thank you for your attention and your energy and being a part of this coven and being a part of my journey as an artist. And as always, I'm so grateful that my music is a part of your life, and I hope that you feel that I have so much love for you reaching through the speakers.
David Nikolic
