Most songwriters, when they’ve got a bass line and two guitar parts happening at once, let those instruments shadow each other. The bass follows the guitar. The second guitar doubles the first, maybe an octave up. It’s the safe way to make a section sound full. Serag Baddar went the other direction on ‘Limerence,’ and the payoff sits right at the end of the track, where he pulls the whole thing apart to show you exactly how it works.
The Malta-based composer released ‘Limerence‘ on August 13th, a 4:10 track that started as a guitar riff he wrote at 15 or 16 and couldn’t yet execute. He’s 30 now. That gap tells you something about how he works. Baddar describes his approach as writing for dopamine, meaning he chases the parts that actually make him feel something and refuses to settle for the cheap satisfaction of just finishing a song. Some ideas sit for over a decade until he’s good enough to do them justice. This riff was one of them.
Here’s what makes the instrumental arrangement worth talking about. Rather than having the bass and guitars trace the same musical idea, Baddar gives every instrument its own melody and its own job. The bass isn’t a rhythmic anchor holding down root notes. The second guitar isn’t harmonizing the first. Each part is a complete musical statement that could stand on its own, and that’s not an accident. It’s the entire point of the song, and Baddar knows it’s his strongest work here. As he put it, “I’m very happy and proud of the fact that every instrument plays something completely different and sounds really good when put together.”
The proof is in the outro, and it’s one of the smarter structural choices on the track. Instead of ending on a final chorus or letting the song fade, Baddar builds a literal demonstration into the last stretch of ‘Limerence.’ He introduces the main guitar riff on its own first. Then that riff stops and the bass line comes in by itself, a completely different melody that holds up fine standing alone. Then the second guitar riff enters alongside the bass, another distinct part that has no interest in copying what came before. And then everything plays together at once, and the three separate lines you just heard in isolation lock into a single massive hook.
It works because each layer was written to be a hook in its own right. When you stack three strong independent melodies that were designed to coexist, you don’t get mud. You get something bigger than the sum of the parts. Playing it out this way, in sequence, is Baddar showing his hand on purpose. He wants you to hear the construction, to understand that the fullness of that final section isn’t studio trickery or a wall of doubled tracks. It’s three distinct parts, each doing its own thing, arriving at the same destination.
The whole aesthetic comes from a specific place. Baddar loves the clean sections in heavier bands, the atmospheric passages that groups like Opeth and Tool use as breathers between the crushing parts. Instead of treating those sections as a break from the heavy stuff, he wanted to know what happens when that clean, melodic character becomes the foundation of an entire song. So ‘Limerence’ is essentially rock music with the distortion switched off, catchy and accessible without leaning on any of the usual heavy dynamics to carry it. There’s a small thread back to Buckethead’s ‘Padmasana’ too, whose rhythm guitar shaped one section. That’s where the track’s original title, Lotus, came from, since padmasana means lotus pose. Lotus eventually became ‘Limerence.’
What’s interesting about this kind of arrangement is how much harder it is to pull off than the standard approach. Doubling instruments is forgiving. Independent counterpoint, where every voice is moving on its own and still has to resolve into something coherent, leaves no room to hide. If one melody is weak, the whole hook collapses. That Baddar can end the song by exposing the individual parts, letting you hear each one naked before they combine, says he trusts the writing. Most producers bury their arrangements so you can’t tell what’s holding the sound up. He does the opposite.
For a track built on that much patience, the outro is a fitting close. Baddar sat on this riff for 15 years partly because he had a rule about it: a good idea deserves to be finished properly, even if properly takes years. The demonstration at the end is him cashing in on that patience out loud, letting the mechanics of the song become part of the listening experience. You can hear ‘Limerence’ on all streaming services including Spotify, and you can buy the single and read the full lyrics on Bandcamp. More of Baddar’s work lives on his website, Instagram, and Facebook.
