The riff came first, back when Serag Baddar was 15 or 16 and nowhere near good enough to do anything with it. He knew it was good. He also knew he couldn’t play it well enough or write around it well enough to build the song he heard in his head. So he shelved it. Not for a week or a summer. For more than a decade. “Limerence,” out August 13th and clocking in at 4:10, is what happened when he finally circled back and found himself capable of finishing what his teenage self started.
Baddar’s story with the guitar starts with a hand-me-down that didn’t quite fit. His dad bought him a vintage Flying V and a small Kustom amp around age 14, and while the amp had a killer sound, the guitar itself was awkward. A Flying V is a hard thing to play sitting down, and a kid learning at home spends most of his time sitting down. He liked it but didn’t take it seriously. That changed a year later when his middle brother handed him a BC Rich Mockingbird. Something about that guitar clicked. He got past beginner level on his own, no lessons, just time and the instrument.
By 16 he had a garage and two friends, and that garage is where most of his early riffs got written. It’s the classic origin, three guys making noise in a suburban garage. But Baddar’s path didn’t follow the usual arc toward a band, a van, and a string of shows. He got more introverted, and instead of fighting that, he leaned into it. He picked up music production, learned how to record guitar and vocals through software, and stopped needing anyone else in the room. These days he starts every song inside a DAW, alone. That shift, from group jams to solo composition, isn’t a footnote in his story. It’s the whole thing. The introversion that might have ended some musicians’ output became the exact condition his best work needed.
Now 30 and based in Malta, Baddar describes himself as a philosopher who happens to make music. His approach to writing is blunt: write for dopamine and nothing else. Chase the feeling, the spark, the moment where good ideas show up without being forced, and you get the highest quality material regardless of genre. He treats music as a hobby rather than a job, which means zero deadline pressure and zero obligation to keep up with demand. Given how he works, that freedom isn’t a luxury. It’s a requirement.
“Limerence” started life as a track called Lotus, with a small nod to Buckethead’s “Padmasana.” Padmasana means lotus pose, hence the original title. Over the years, Lotus became Limerence. The DNA of the song comes from Baddar’s love of the clean, atmospheric sections buried inside heavier bands like Opeth and Tool. Most bands use those passages as a breather between the heavy parts. Baddar wanted to know what happens when you build the entire song out of that quieter material instead. The answer is a kind of rock with no distortion, catchy and accessible but structured in a way that doesn’t sound like everything else. He points to Opeth’s “Damnation” as the rare full record that lived entirely in that clean space, and to Buckethead cuts like “Electric Tears” as proof that this territory has real gems in it.
The part of “Limerence” Baddar is proudest of is how the instruments relate to each other. Nothing is just doubling anything else. Each part does its own thing, and the payoff comes at the end of the track, where he breaks the hook down piece by piece. The main riff plays first. It drops out, and the bass comes in. Then the second guitar riff enters alongside the bass. Then everything stacks together at once, and you hear how three separate lines that each hold up on their own combine into one hook. It’s a genuinely clever piece of arranging, the kind of thing that rewards a close listen and shows the work without over-explaining it.
His golden rule for what to keep and what to scrap: if a riff sounds good on its own and hands you a concept, an image of how a whole song could take shape, it’s worth holding onto. It doesn’t have to fit everything else, and struggling to write a follow-up isn’t a reason to toss it. That teenage riff passed the test 15 years ago, and eventually he grew into it.
What’s next is quieter and looser. Baddar is writing vocals for a track called “Electric Smoke,” a bluesier song with a Kyuss kind of vibe, less rhyming, more feel. It’s the direction he sees himself heading, and once he finishes vocals for it and the rest of his clean material, he plans to bundle everything into an EP. He doesn’t play live, and he’s clear that this vocal work will take time, so things stay quiet for a while. That’s fine by him. His parting advice is the same principle that made him wait 15 years in the first place: write out of love for the craft, don’t settle for the cheap dopamine of a finished song, and keep working until it’s actually right, even if that takes years.
You can hear “Limerence” on Spotify and every other streaming service, or buy the single and read the lyrics on Bandcamp. More at his website, Instagram, and Facebook.
