Bombay Cat Babysitting Review: A Deep Dive Into Identity, Trauma & Self-Suppression

Bombay Cat – Babysitting Review: On Killing a Version of Yourself and Learning How to Live With It

by Rahul
April 12, 2026

There’s a moment early in Babysitting that quietly defines the entire album.

In Gone, Gone, Barney and Junior walk together, almost aimlessly. There’s no visible tension between them, no sense that something is about to break. If anything, it feels intimate — like watching someone exist alongside a part of themselves they haven’t yet questioned.

And then, without warning, Barney kills Junior.

There’s no dramatic build-up, no clear justification. Just a decision that feels both deliberate and difficult to process. It doesn’t read like transformation, but more like a rupture.

Because the album isn’t interested in what it means to become someone new. It’s interested in something far more uncomfortable — what it means to remove a part of yourself, and then continue living with what’s left behind.

Who Are Barney and Junior? Understanding the World of Babysitting

Before getting into the album itself, it’s important to understand the relationship at the centre of Babysitting — because on the surface, it can feel like a story about two people.

Barney and Junior are not separate characters in the traditional sense. They are two versions of the same person, externalised across the album’s visuals and writing.

Barney exists as the self that is trying to function — the one navigating expectations, relationships, and the everyday reality of living within systems that constantly ask you to adjust. Junior, on the other hand, feels like everything that doesn’t quite fit into those systems. The emotional, instinctive, and unfiltered version of the self that is often pushed aside in order to survive.

This is what makes the opening of Gone, Gone so significant. The two aren’t in conflict when we first see them. They walk together, almost comfortably, as if both versions are still able to coexist. But when Barney kills Junior, it doesn’t feel like the removal of an enemy. It feels like a decision — one that is difficult to justify, but easy to recognise.

Because most people have done some version of this at some point in their lives.

You suppress parts of yourself that don’t fit, that complicate things, that make it harder to move through the world.

And that’s where the title of the album starts to take on meaning.

Babysitting isn’t about caring for someone else. It’s about managing yourself — or more specifically, managing the different versions of yourself that don’t always align. It’s about holding things together even when they don’t quite make sense. Keeping certain emotions in check, pushing others aside, learning how to function despite everything that sits underneath.

But the album also suggests something else.

That the parts of yourself you try to manage (or even remove) don’t really disappear.

They stay with you, and at some point, you have to face them again.

Chapter I: Identity, Conditioning, and the First Break

Once that decision is made (once Junior is gone) the album begins to unfold differently.

The first chapter, feels like an attempt to understand what led to that moment in the first place. There’s a constant tension between who Barney is and who he’s expected to be, and that tension never presents itself as outright rebellion. Instead, it shows up as adaptation: subtle, exhausting, and deeply internal.

In Why Me?, that struggle becomes more explicit. The writing moves through childhood, identity, and the early formation of self under social pressure.

An attempt to align with expectations that never quite feel natural, even when followed closely.

Hey Gardener builds on this, framing authority through a lens that feels both personal and symbolic. The “gardener” is not just a parent, but a representation of everything that shapes you — family, culture, systems of belief. And what makes this dynamic compelling is that it isn’t rooted in resentment alone.

“I can never hate you… even if I want to so much”

There’s love here, and that complicates everything.

Because when expectations come from places of care, resisting them doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like betrayal.

By the time the chapter reaches We Don’t Talk About That Shit, the album moves from internal confusion to something more suffocating — silence. This is where the album becomes sharply specific in its commentary.

The issue is no longer just what Barney is feeling. It’s the environment around him that refuses to acknowledge it.

“They don’t think I need a shrink…”

But this isn’t just silence — it’s what happens when pain is consistently dismissed until it starts to feel normal. When asking for help begins to feel pointless, and eventually, something you stop doing altogether.

There’s a moment in the song where the question becomes almost unbearable:

“Can I get someone to save my life?”

And the response is delay, deflection and discomfort.

Instead of engagement, there’s dismissal. Instead of understanding, there’s minimisation. And over time, that silence teaches something dangerous — not how to heal, but how to manage pain alone.

Chapter II: The Aftermath of Removal

If the first chapter is about pressure, the second is about consequence.

Because once Junior is gone, something doesn’t resolve — it fragments. And that fragmentation doesn’t feel abstract. It shows up in the way the album moves, in the way emotions return without ever fully settling, in the way nothing quite feels complete.

The songs in this section don’t move forward in a linear sense. They loop, revisit, and sit with emotions that don’t fully land. There’s anger, but it never quite reaches release. There’s an attempt at forgiveness, but it feels incomplete.

“Yet I forgive you… but can’t forget you”

It reads less like closure and more like exhaustion. And this is where the absence of Junior starts to matter.

Because everything that follows begins to feel like life without the part of yourself that could actually process what you’re going through. The part that could feel fully, react honestly, or even break when needed.

Without that, what’s left isn’t clarity.

It’s distance, and that distance doesn’t feel peaceful. It feels like something inside you has gone quiet — something that was never meant to.

This is the cost of survival that the album keeps circling back to.

Ganymede is where the album stops circling and forces you to sit with something far more uncomfortable. The writing leans into trauma in a way that feels direct and unfiltered, touching on memory, violation, and the way guilt can attach itself to experiences that were never yours to carry.

“I thought I was the one… took the blame for your sins”

There’s a kind of numbness here that isn’t just about pain, but about what happens after it has been replayed enough times to lose its edge. When something that should have been processed instead becomes something you carry quietly, without resolution.

TV extends this idea into relationships, where connection starts to feel transactional rather than meaningful.

“Turn me on when you feel you’re bored”

And that’s where the album becomes quietly devastating, in showing what it looks like to function without being fully connected to yourself.

Chapter III: Love, Belonging, and the Return of the Self

The final chapter turns toward love, but not in a way that resolves anything neatly. Instead, it questions the very idea of love as something pure or universally accessible.

In Love!? and Mustard Fields, love feels shaped by rules, expectations, and inherited contradictions. It exists within boundaries: some visible, others deeply embedded.

“I tried to be everything they want…”

That line echoes across the entire album.

Because whether it’s identity, family, or relationships, the central struggle remains the same — trying to exist authentically within structures that don’t fully allow it.

And that tension reaches its peak in My Happy Ending.

“My Happy Ending”: Not Resolution, But Recognition

By the time the album reaches its closer, the idea of a “happy ending” feels distant, almost ironic.

“My happy ending will never see daylight”

It’s rooted in the same conflict that runs through the entire project, the gap between what is expected and what feels possible.

But what follows is what gives the album its emotional weight.

Barney collapses, and then, unexpectedly Junior returns.

Not as something to fight. Not as something to remove again. But as something that was never fully gone — something that had been carried all along, even in its absence.

What follows isn’t confrontation in the traditional sense. There’s no attempt to dominate or erase. Instead, there’s recognition. They hold each other, and in that moment, the separation that defined the album begins to dissolve.

Conclusion: What Does It Mean to Move Forward?

Babysitting doesn’t really resolve itself in the way you might expect it to. It doesn’t arrive at a clear sense of healing, and it doesn’t frame growth as something that can be neatly understood by the time it ends.

If anything, it feels more like the album is asking you to sit with what remains.

Because once you’ve made the kind of decision it centres itself around — to suppress, to remove, to distance yourself from a part of who you are, there isn’t really a clean way back from that.

What’s left isn’t just absence, but a shift in how you experience everything that follows. The world doesn’t necessarily change, but your relationship to it does.

And that’s where the idea of Babysitting begins to feel less like control, and more like maintenance. A way of continuing to function while holding together different versions of yourself that don’t fully align anymore.

By the time the album reaches its final moments, it doesn’t feel like anything has been fixed. If anything, it feels like something has been recognised.