Hillbilly Smellegy: Baque by Slumberhouse

Remember being 14 and rifling through your parents’ liquor cabinet for something they’d never notice was missing? As a kid these were the candy-colored bottles we wanted to drink from anyway, like Disaronno (so good), Calvados, or Robitussin-flavored Framboise. If you feel at all nostalgic for the smell of a decade-old, crusted over container of peach schnapps, look no further than Slumberhouse, brainchild of self-taught indie perfumer Josh Lobb.

Lobb works in micro batches, so you can’t find his perfumes anywhere, and where you can they sell out immediately. Resultantly the resale market is astronomical— new bottles go for about $180, but a search on ebay starts at 2X retail, up to nearly 7k for 30 ml. The names of the frags are made up, vaguely mystical-sounding words like Jeke (whisky, honey, tobacco), Norne (pine, moss, and incense), and Ore (oak, amber and cocoa-dusted patchouli). Normally this is the sort of weird fairy shit I would write off immediately but tonight I’m eating crow for dinner because these perfumes fucking rock.

I first fell in love with Kiste in 2022, a rerelease (reformulation?) of a 2015 Slumberhouse by the same name. With notes of nectarine, tobacco, and honey, Kiste smelled like summer sweat and home brewed hooch, but sold out in just days, leaving me at the mercy of Mercari where bottles started at $600. When Baque (n. 2012) came out of the vault this year I pulled trig immediately on a blind buy.

It’s true that Kiste and Baque operate along the same lines, but Baque is even more assertive, jammier, with a syrupy earl grey opening that dries down to a warm, tobacco-stained mead. If Lobb has a signature it’s strong, woody, and sweet— he uses tons of absolutes in his blends— but even with performance this nuclear, his perfumes are pretty easy on the nose. Generally, a humid pipe tobacco note imparts an elegant masculinity, think Derviche II by Rogue, Hilde Soliani’s Bell'Antonio, or Écrin de Fumée by Serge Lutens ($57 on Fragrancenet). Here, the impression is one of a bearded, grizzled backwoodsman drinking bathtub brandy on the porch of a ramshackle cabin. I’ve been overspraying Baque this summer because its Appalachia-coded sappy stickiness only gets stronger with sweat and heat.

If you want something similar, Ummo by Xinú is another honeyed tobacco, though the polished drydown smells more “finished” than Baque, which is rougher, hand-stitched and frayed at the edges. If perfume had politics this one would be a Libertarian. In fact, with its rugged, outsider quality, I’d go as far as to call this the Ted Kaczynski of fragrances. Dark, moody, and boldly IFRA noncompliant, Baque is a resinous revolution against the system. Whose side are you on?