In heavy music, the clean section usually has one job. It gives the listener a moment of air before the distortion comes back, a few bars of arpeggios and space that make the next riff hit harder. Serag Baddar wanted those sections to be the whole song. “Limerence,” released on August 13 and running four minutes and ten seconds, is what happened when he finally built one.
Baddar is a 30-year-old composer based in Malta who describes himself as someone who’s into philosophy and happens to write music. He got his start the way a lot of players do, badly and by accident. His father bought him a cheap vintage Flying V and a small Kustom amp when he was around 14, and while the amp sounded great, the guitar was awkward to play sitting down, so he never took it seriously. A year later his middle brother bought him a BC Rich Mockingbird, and that was the one that stuck. He pushed himself past beginner level on his own. By 16 he had a garage with two friends where he wrote most of his riffs, and as he got more introverted he moved into production, learned to record guitar and vocals himself, and never went back. These days a DAW is where songs start.
One riff from that period refused to go away. Baddar wrote it at 15 or 16 and understood immediately that he wasn’t good enough at songwriting or guitar to build the song he was imagining, so he set it aside until he could do it justice. “It’s a very nice riff,” he says. “Even the way it’s played on the guitar, every note is placed conveniently where your hand can reach without having to stretch or move anywhere at all. For me, as a 15 or 16-year-old, writing that riff meant I had a melody that sounded professional, and I was very proud of that because at the time I really sucked at my instrument.”
The song went through multiple iterations before it landed, originally under the title “Lotus,” a nod to Buckethead’s “Padmasana,” whose rhythm guitar shaped one section of the track. Padmasana is the lotus pose, which is where the working title came from. Over time, “Lotus” became “Limerence.” Baddar says he got attached to the song even in its unfinished state, partly because so many versions of it contained things he wanted to keep and couldn’t.
What holds the thing together is a structural decision rather than a stylistic one. Baddar loves the clean passages in Opeth and Tool, and rather than treat them as contrast, he made them the foundation and left the distortion off entirely. “Opeth combines metal with clean riffs, especially inspired by 70s bands. I always wanted their clean sections to be entire songs, and from Opeth we only got one record like that, ‘Damnation’,” he says. He points to Buckethead’s “Electric Tears” and “A Real Diamond in the Rough” as proof the approach can stay accessible. “It’s always through wanting more of this that kept me inspired to keep my distortion off and stay clean.”
The most revealing moment comes at the end, where Baddar takes the hook apart in front of the listener. The main riff plays, then stops. The bass comes in. The second guitar riff arrives on top of the bass. Then everything runs together once. It’s a small act of transparency, and it makes a point that’s easy to miss on a first pass, which is that none of these parts are doubling each other. “I’m very happy and proud of the fact that every instrument plays something completely different and sounds really good when put together,” he says.
That kind of patience comes from treating music as a hobby rather than a job. Baddar writes for what he calls dopamine, meaning everything he keeps has to make him feel like he’s listening to a favorite band, and he works on sparks, those bursts of creative energy where good material arrives without effort. “There’s no pressure at all. I do whatever I want and release material at my own pace,” he says. “If there was ever a demand, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with it because of the way that I write.” The lyrics came late and stayed personal, including a passing reference to a Metallica song about love going on, before the track closes on a repeated request to be talked to.
Next up is vocal writing for “Electric Smoke,” a bluesier track he wrote with Kyuss in mind, and eventually an EP collecting the rest of his clean material. He doesn’t play live, and he’s upfront that the vocals will take time, so things will be quiet for a stretch. His advice to other writers is the same rule he applied to that teenage riff. Write out of love for the craft, skip the cheap satisfaction of having a song finished, and work on it until it’s right even if that takes years. Fifteen years is a long time for a riff to wait, unless the four minutes it turns into are worth it.
“Limerence” is on all streaming services, with the single and lyrics available on Bandcamp and his catalog on Spotify. More on Baddar can be found at his official site, on Facebook, and on Instagram.
