Starrgirl came out in August without a video for “Heaven Baby,” its duet with ZAYN, and the song spent the next seven weeks finding its listeners on its own. The video arrived this evening, and it lands on a record that is climbing again.
Most of that finding happened in Britain, on two charts built for two different communities. On the Official British Asian Music Chart, the weekly countdown BBC Asian Network plays for South Asian acts, “Heaven Baby” has been No. 1 every week since it arrived. ZAYN, who is British-Pakistani, had already led that list this year with “Sideways” and “Side Effects.” On the Official Afrobeats Chart, the song sat at No. 2 for its first four weeks, slid to No. 6, and is back up to No. 3 this week. Two of Britain’s diaspora charts have been carrying the same song all summer, with no picture to go with it.
The song explains the double pull itself, because it is written as a conversation. Ayra opens with “I know how far I go, I wish you did,” and ZAYN’s verse picks up her words and answers them: “You know how far I’d go? It’s past the sky.” By the time their voices meet on the chorus, “If you ever left this planet, baby / Couldn’t manage, baby,” the feature sounds like the reply her first verse was waiting for.
The video gives each of them a room before it lets them share one. Ayra, in a blue slip dress and a beaded choker, sings from a pale domed gallery, leaning over a white balustrade with her head thrown back while the camera looks up at her through a round opening in the ceiling. ZAYN gets somewhere darker, a concrete-and-glass hall with a lit grid for a floor, where he sits alone against a pillar and lifts his eyes. When she turns up in his hall, she stands across the glowing floor from him, beside another pillar. For a song that calls the other person heaven, shooting her from below is the plainest idea available, and it works because it is plain.
In August, DancehallMag argued that a proper push for “Heaven Baby” would start with a video inside its first fortnight; it came in the eighth week, and the charts suggest the song lost very little by waiting.