Baird

Baltimore, Stevie Wonder and a brother with better records

Baird grew up in Baltimore, and the music that formed him arrived through the house rather than through a scene. His mother played Stevie Wonder; a friend of his older brother passed on Flying Lotus and the unreleased Jai Paul recordings that circulated in the early 2010s. Speaking in October 2020, when he was 24, he traced his method straight back to those two discoveries: he starts from sound and rhythm rather than words, and treats arrangement as collage rather than songwriting.

The family detail matters, because the brother is in the same trade. Gabe Acheson records as Goldwash, and the two now share a studio on South Hill in Los Angeles, the city Baird moved to at the start of the pandemic. The bird motif that runs through everything he puts out is, as he explained in March 2022, three jokes at once: a pun on his own surname, a nod to Baltimore's Orioles and Ravens, and a tribute to his mother's birdwatching.

BIRDSONGS: an exercise that became a trilogy

The BIRDSONGS mixtapes began as deliberate practice. His reasoning, given in 2022, was blunt — the only way to get good at something is to do it a lot — so he set himself a three-volume template and worked through it. Vol. 2 appeared in 2020, seven tracks begun in Mexico City and finished in Los Angeles with Goldwash. He had no settled name for the result, conceding that he lacked a good phrase for it and landing on electro-acoustic, with the stated aim of blurring the line between a DJ set and a live band.

Vol. 3 closed the sequence on 25 March 2022: seven tracks, among them "Backboard", "Lianne", "Lightning Of July" and "On My Mind Pt. 2". It was issued alongside a limited double vinyl collecting all three volumes with eight demos available only on the physical release. The names he cited around it — Caetano Veloso, Joni Mitchell, Earl Sweatshirt, Mavi, Dirty Projectors, Lianne La Havas — explain a catalogue that moves between guitar figures and heavily distorted drums without warning. The same records carry guest turns from Kevin Abstract on "Easy v2" and Berhana on "Beluga v2". About the shows he was unambiguous: he wanted them fun, something to dance to or sing along with, not something to be studied.

The other job: building records for other people

Production is where his name has travelled furthest. He played drums and guitar on Brockhampton's "Don't Shoot Up the Party", and he was in the room for Arlo Parks's second album, My Soft Machine, released by Transgressive on 26 May 2023. He co-wrote and co-produced "Devotion" and "Pegasus", the track featuring Phoebe Bridgers, and co-produced "Dog Rose". The album reached number nine on the UK chart, topped the UK independent chart and carried a Metacritic average of 75, with a five-star review in Dork and a more sceptical 6.9 from Pitchfork.

Three years later the relationship produced something much larger. On Ambiguous Desire, issued by Transgressive on 3 April 2026, Baird is the primary producer across most of the running order — "Blue Disco", "Jetta", "Get Go", "Senses", "Heaven", "Beams", "South Seconds", "Nightswimming" and "2Sided" — with additional work from Paul Epworth, Buddy Ross, Andrew Sarlo, Rob Bisel, Romil Hemnani, Dylan Neustadter and Parks herself. Pre-release material framed the record against the queer club culture of New York's Paradise Garage, the nocturnal end of UK dance music in The Streets and Burial, and the influence of LCD Soundsystem and Theo Parrish. It entered the UK albums chart at 13, went to number one on the UK independent chart, and drew a Metacritic score of 77 from fourteen critics.

South Hill Experiment, the louder half of the catalogue

The brothers formalised their partnership as The South Hill Experiment in 2022, naming it after the street where the studio sits. Its third album, EARTHBREAKS, came out on 21 March 2025: eleven tracks written, recorded and produced by Baird and Gabriel Acheson at South Hill Studios in Los Angeles, with additional vocals from DJ Stanfill on "Passion Fades" and Yendry Fiorentino on "Silver Bullet", guitar from Tim McNalley and drums from Ryan Raines and Mano Ruiz. Seth Manchester mixed it at Machines with Magnets, Dave Cooley mastered it, and the vinyl shipped with a lyric insert and the project's manifesto.

The record closed a trilogy built around the planet and its destruction, and the brothers leaned on feedback, resonance and found spaces — including a large stairwell — to colour it. A review in April 2025 described it as darker and heavier than their earlier work, singling out "RIFTING", the denser "Storm's Eye", the danceable "Open Ocean" and "Resonance", and called the album a thoughtful take on what an album can be. The promotional campaign, which involved digging the group's logo into salt flats, divided opinion between genius and insanity, which is roughly the reaction the duo appears to want.

Where he stands in autumn 2026

"Dogpile" arrived on 3 September 2026, his first solo release since the BIRDSONGS trilogy ended four years earlier, and it landed in the middle of the biggest live run of his career. Arlo Parks's Desire tour runs from August to December 2026 across North America, the UK and Europe, with general ticket sales having opened on 13 March 2026; Baird has been on it as support, which puts the producer of the record on stage before the record is played.

His own listed diary for the European leg opens at The Academy in Dublin on 17 October and continues through London's O2 Academy Brixton on 20 October, the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow on 24 October, Bristol's Prospect Building on 25 October and Albert Hall in Manchester on 26 October. The mainland dates run from TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht on 28 October and Berlin's Uber Eats Music Hall on 31 October through three consecutive nights at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris on 6, 7 and 8 November, Sala Apolo in Barcelona on 13 November, Store VEGA in Copenhagen on 29 November and Oslo's Parkteatret on 1 December, finishing at Slaktkyrkan in Johanneshov, on the southern edge of Stockholm, on 2 December.

What the set looks like now

The current show is a support set rather than a headline run, and it is played as a band rather than from behind a laptop. At the Observatory North Park in San Diego on 14 September 2026 the stage held bird-shaped metal cutouts hanging from chains, catching the backlight; Baird moved between guitar and keyboard mid-song with a drummer behind him, and the review noted the room filling up as the set went on rather than emptying out. "Dogpile" was in the set alongside unreleased material, which the reviewer thought he was visibly enjoying most.