From a blog post by SongOffice.... "Melina Twyman was 19 years old when she decided to pursue a music career after The John Lennon Tour Bus made a stop in San Antonio,Texas and gave her an opportunity to professionally film, produce, and record a music video for her original song “Runaway” in March of 2013. The experience left a lasting impression and inspired her to move to Austin, Texas where she continued to develop her songwriting skills in the city’s open mic scene. In January of 2014 she released the single “Put Down The Bottle” on YouTube which quickly attracted a following. The two albums she released on iTunes and Spotify began to generate sales after her songs were featured on Pandora Radio. Although she initially started to generate a buzz in the Texas indie folk scene she felt restricted by the genre and increasingly uncomfortable with the squeaky clean image that she felt pressured to maintain for her career.

 She took a break from everything in 2015 and for three months took up a job waitressing to save money for a move to California. Even though she felt emotionally drained and hadn’t performed for months she couldn’t help but wonder if her fans would accept the underground hip-hop sound that inspired her to write to music in the first place as a teenager in Houston, Texas. Unable to leave music behind for good; she quietly recorded and released the single “Gold“ as Bateau and officially retired her old stage name Melina Evalyn on Facebook. 

The risk payed off and “Gold” quickly won over her fans and drew in the interest of Austin Rapper/producer HADES, who then signed her to his Black Market Pluto Label after they collaborated together on the song “Downtown (Houston)” 

Listening to the new tracks it’s easy to see that Melina’s vocals grew more ambitious as she started to pen more autobiographical lyrics and incorporated a more mature sound. Her voice hovers with ease over the Deep bass and dark atmospheric tones that HADES has brought to the table on both “Downtown (Houston)” and her latest release “Airplane.” on which she effortlessly delivers the lines “and I have never been one to fall apart…/ and I got all my success to back it” on the hook. 

Bateau’s debut album is currently in production and is expected to release in September of this year. " From OVRLD... "Riding around aimlessly at night is a teenage tradition going back to the advent of the age group (so all the way back to the mid-20th century, basically) but I’d argue in Harris County we took it a bit more religiously than where you and yours are from. Houston and its outlying zones are built by, for and around driving, its roads a circulatory system that have burst through the boundaries of the flesh to consume the body whole. That tradition is what gets mined by H-town transplant Bateau on “Dowtown,” her beautifully venomous voice detailing lax rides around the back ways while getting drunk at 17, the reminiscing given an erotically charged undercurrent by HADES’ trip hop beat. Beaumont might have been the outlying area that got the surprise True Detective cameo, but “Downtown” makes a good case for Houston as a future southern gothic noir backdrop. And beyond that it makes a case for Bateau as a new Houston influencer for Austin, an artist with a sound far more addictive than any watered down chopped and screwed derivatives."