“Carnal is a normal mode,” sings Baths’ Will Wiesenfeld on his latest single, before continuing: “Fucking all the men in droves.” Aptly titled “Sea of Men,” the unfiltered, new song is a preview of his forthcoming album Gut, due out February 21, and sees the musician writing “from the stomach” with “no regard to personal embarrassment or relatability.” Beyond sex and romance, Wiesenfeld bravely dives head first into the spectrum of his “personal shortcomings,” from “dreamless living” to “harmful fantasies” and “dissonant self-identities,” as he describes.

The “Sea of Men” music video, premiering today on PAPER, delivers something with “immediacy,” a word Wiesenfeld uses frequently to explain the world of Gut. Rather than a dark, mysterious feeling, the self-directed film aims for a classic look, as the band performs in a bright white space before an audience. He has nothing left to hide, unleashing everything on this project — a fearlessness visualized by the video cast circling around him seated at the center, as he stares deadpan into the camera.

Below, PAPER talks further with Baths about “Sea of Men,” and the “disarmingly forward, maybe even belligerent” nature of Gut.

Gut is your first album in seven years. What did you learn during that time that you’ve put into this project?

I’m sure that I’ve grown in plenty of ways, but it’s hard to take stock of my life as a whole and say anything definitively. I’m literally just living one day to the next. I’ve certainly taken in more art, books, movies, games, music. Maybe one thing I’m more certain of than ever before is how important exercise has become to my mental health — that my mood on an exercise day versus a non-exercise day is tangibly different.

You mention there’s newfound honesty in this project. How did you tap into that and why now?

I had to come to terms with how intensely sex governs my thinking, in all aspects of my life. Like I’m proudly out and gay and all of that, but it’s still embarrassing how pervasive my sexual thoughts are, or my self-analysis and criticism of those thoughts. Making a new record that reflected something honest about the most recent chapter of my life meant addressing those feelings, living inside of them — attempting to understand my sexuality and isolation by not diluting how those things exist for me, and chasing that same immediacy with the lyrics.

Musically, Gut reflects my more recent listening, but obviously gets funneled through whatever weird process I have, which eventually got to a place that fueled the emotional push I was trying to get across with the lyrics. It wasn’t exactly a natural process to get to that cohesion, but I do think I found it in the end.

Lyrically, what’s the story behind “Sea of Men”?

The story of it is more fun to leave to the listener, but I can share that it was obtuse, messy and laborious, where my love life and songwriting exist in an exact parallel. I think a good lyrical summation of “Sea of Men” is “reckoning with my voracious sexual appetite.”

How do you think “Sea of Men” is a development of where you’ve been and a reflection of where you are now, musically?

“Sea of Men” doesn’t make an effort to change how I feel or express myself through music, but it does take on a palette or medium that is less familiar to myself and the Baths repertoire. I’m a fan of all sorts of rock, but especially the sort where artists are doing something different, and that electricity was a driving inspiration. Like, the idea of a “band-sounding record” was the inciting concept, but I can’t help myself, and I always fold in all the other things I find interesting along the way as well. In part Gut was an effort to prove to myself that I’m capable of a sort of music that I hadn’t actively pursued before, but it very quickly just became “correct” to have the album sound the sort of direct way that it does, and I didn’t have to focus on it as conceptually as I did at first. I could just sort of build the world of it from the inside out once I realized I was comfortable there.

I love this video. How did you approach it, creatively, and as an extension of the song?

I wanted immediacy. That’s one of many keywords in my explanations around Gut: immediate, nude, adult (and unadulterated), relentless, angry. I wanted the video to feel sort of stark and simple, where the thing you take away from it is essentially just very visible people. Maybe movement, like an edit-enhanced performance that gives the video and the song itself a solid symbiosis. And I wanted the look of it to be defiantly bright. A lot of music videos, including my own, are often darker and obfuscated, but I want to not live in any deep mystery about the music of Gut or the world built inside of this record. There’s no part of me that has anywhere left to hide, sort of. It’s supposed to be disarmingly forward, maybe even belligerent.

Who’re the different people featured in the space?

I put out a “close friends” call on Instagram and these are the friends who responded [laughs]. That casting was remarkably one of the easiest parts of the process. Everyone was great, thoroughly amicable and great with taking directions when needed. As it so happens each and every one of them are fantastic artists in their own right, and contributed some great ideas too.

How does “Sea of Men” represent this project as an early taste of what’s to come?

I think it has a good balance between the extremes of where Gut ends up. It’s got band elements, but rides like more of a pop song, has some experimental sounds and moments. It’s a taste of the sort of skeletal structure of the record without giving too much away about where it diverts, both sonically and lyrically.

There’s no part of me that has anywhere left to hide, sort of.

Photography: Tonje Thilesen