Goth Babe

Tennessee, then whichever coast had waves

Goth Babe is one person with a laptop and a lot of gear: Griff Washburn, a Tennessean who started the project in 2015. He picked up a guitar at sixteen and worked through blues and singer-songwriter material, then garage punk, before landing on the electronic production that defines the records. The early output went straight to SoundCloud, with no label and no plan beyond finishing things.

The geography matters more than most artist biographies. Washburn left Tennessee for Nashville to chase music, reached the West Coast by way of New York, and by 2020 was living in the Columbia River Gorge about an hour outside Portland, in a tiny home he had built on a trailer. He was candid at the time that the appeal was practical rather than romantic: the gear stayed set up, so a track could be picked at over several days instead of being packed away after every session.

The songwriting runs in the opposite direction to the usual arrangement. Climbing, snowboarding and surfing come first and the music is the residue, which is why the catalogue reads like a logbook — place names, seasons, conditions. The project's own description of itself is deliberately unhelpful: Griff Washburn enjoying himself.

A decade of singles doing the heavy lifting

For most of its life Goth Babe was a singles and EPs operation, not an albums one — ten EPs and nineteen singles against a single studio album. "Velvet Sheets" arrived in 2017, and then "Sometimes" in 2018 and "Weekend Friend" in 2019 broke the project open; by 2020 those two alone had passed 45 million combined Spotify streams. "Moments / Tides" followed in 2020, then "I Wanna Help Your Mind", "Canary Islands" and "Casita" across 2021, and the Iceland EP in 2022.

The EPs tend to be souvenirs of a specific stretch of time. North Coast came out of an unusually good surf season; the Tongass and Oregon Coast releases name the places outright. Washburn signed to Mom + Pop Music, the label behind the album campaign, and the catalogue has stayed consistent enough in tone that a set can move between a 2018 single and a 2024 album track without a seam.

Two things nearly derailed it. Washburn has spoken about living with PTSD after being robbed at gunpoint, and in 2022 his home burned down, taking years of unreleased music stored on an iMac with it.

Lola: the album named after the boat

The debut proper was announced on 17 July 2023 alongside the single "Bioluminescence", with a trailer and short film directed by Ian Durkin that featured Washburn and his Australian shepherd, Sadie. It was titled Lola, after the off-grid sailboat he lives and writes on, and was billed for autumn 2023 on Mom + Pop.

It did not land then. "Backwards", made with WATTS, arrived at the end of November 2023, and the eleven-track album followed on 26 January 2024 — an Urban Outfitters-exclusive sea-foam vinyl pressing included. The framing around it was less sunlit than the singles suggested: the record draws on the years spent in a car, a tiny house and a camper van, and on loneliness and trauma as much as on freedom. Washburn's stated hope for the songs was that they let people escape the weight and heaviness of the world for a second.

Since then there has been one release: Tongass National Forest, three songs, out on 24 September 2025. "The Tongass" has gone straight into the live set.

Autumn 2026: second on the bill, bigger rooms

The current chapter is a support slot rather than a headline run. Foster the People announced the Good Mourning Sunshine North American tour on 29 April 2026, with general on-sale on 8 May, and named Goth Babe as the guest on almost every date. The tour runs from 9 September to 23 October 2026, with The Beaches taking the Red Rocks show on 22 September.

That has put Washburn into amphitheatres and large halls on a nightly basis — WaMu Theater in Seattle on 16 September, the Ford Amphitheater in Nampa on 19 September, Starlight Theatre in Kansas City on 24 September, Huntington Bank Pavilion in Chicago on 26 September, the Minneapolis Armory on 28 September, Milwaukee on 29 September and Saint Louis Music Park on 30 September. The October leg takes in Toronto, Pittsburgh, Boston's MGM Music Hall at Fenway, The Anthem in Washington, Blossom Music Center, Forest Hills Stadium, Philadelphia, Nashville, Atlanta, Austin, Houston, Irving and Petco Park in San Diego before finishing in Los Angeles on 23 October.

Before the tour there was a festival outing: Outside Days in Denver on 29 May 2026, on the University of Colorado's Auraria campus, where Goth Babe played a full fifteen-song set at 7.45pm.

The set, and what it looks like

The Denver set is the clearest picture of the full show: "Insides", "Moments/Tides", "Mexico", "Casita", the Louis the Child collaboration "Encinitas", "Whole World", "Backwards", "Sun Comes Up", "The Tongass", "Crocodile", a cover of Weezer's "Undone – The Sweater Song", "Sadie", "Sometimes", "Running Around" and "Weekend Friend". The Foster the People sets are compressed versions of that — six to nine songs in a forty-minute window, typically 8pm to 8.40pm.

Headline shows have had considerably more furniture. At Granary Live in Salt Lake City on 8 October 2024, with The Aces opening, the three-piece — Washburn on vocals plus drums and keys — came on through fog, threw beach balls and inflatables into the crowd during "Casita", and ran a game of Mario Kart on the screen behind the stage with the audience split into teams, the winners handed a Will Ferrell cutout from Elf. Washburn passed a disposable camera into the crowd and asked for it back full. The band returned a third time for roughly ten minutes of straight dance music.

The support slot strips that back to the playing. Reviewing the 18 September 2026 show at Beddy's Plaza at America First Field in Sandy, Utah — delayed by rain, in front of a crowd that had been standing about — the write-up had Washburn spinning around the stage from the first bar and judged his voice clear, warm and steady while he was in constant motion, with the audience dancing and singing by mid-set.

Where the money goes

The environmental side is not decoration. Ticket, streaming and merchandise revenue is routed to conservation groups including Protect Our Winters, Project Zero and the Conservation Lands Foundation, and the project has leaned on brand work to fund the same end — a signature hard kombucha with JuneShine, with proceeds to environmental causes.

The film work has done better than most musician side projects. Creation Theory, made with Arc'teryx on the relationship between sport and creativity, took the Creative Excellence Award at Banff, Best Soundtrack at Spain's Mendi Film Festival and a Vimeo Staff Pick. Earlier, in 2020, Washburn contributed to the benefit compilation The Song Is Coming From Inside the House, raising money for Groundswell's Rapid Response Fund during the pandemic.