Begin your career by saying Bo Ta Bo Lampa, and you’ve already sealed the deal: you are already legendary. After that earth-shattering statement, there frankly can’t be anywhere left to go for production extraordinaires Heureux Pour Vous – but as true legends do to avoid the sophomore slump, the duo hunker down and look inwards for their follow-up, honing their craft with swirling beats, a flurry of airhorns and impeccable attention to detail. How can you possibly beat a cosmic full meal of lup cheong, char kway teow, cai tao kway and kopi siew dai? Begedils aside, the answer is retreating to a friendlier part of the sonic meal: the artisanal bakery.

On Ants In My Bread, the duo beat back with a great guide to bread, yeast, dough and great advice for everything in between: don’t add too much water, have a good starter. In fact, that advice works as great wisdom for life itself: how do you live without hydration? Like Ronaldo, the day kicks off way better with water. Above all, the duo make one thing clear: if bread is divine metaphor for the body, they’re nothing short of life’s greatest delights, a pleasure that should be protected with good quality cling wrap – and surely, nobody wants their soul to be infested by insects. 

But because I’m no superstar, my memories of bread have never reached extravagant sourdough heights. Nevertheless, that doesn’t distract from my fond memories of bakeries of times past – although admittedly nothing as lofty as the sourdough they describe. Of all of these, there’s one baked good baked so deeply into my heart that I would not want any insect to ruin. To recall the name, we must go back to humbler origins (albeit no less legendary): the name is DJ Bakery.

Today, DJ Bakery is somewhat of a commonplace name, with its footsteps all across heartlands, cities, and even the hallowed Esplanade basement. But people ought not to ignore its Yishun origins - from its unassuming location and neighborhood, it was their ovens that crafted countless childhood signposts for me. Of all of its creations, one always anchored my memories of my short trips out to the neighborhood: its name was the Spiderweb, their signature product, but also their only one with a name. The creation’s name always felt kooky to me: splattered with cheese strands on its surface, it felt like too heavy of a metaphor for its silk-smooth namesake – what’s more, if the sausages were the spiders, then why were they all on the edges of the bread? All these questions swirled in my head when I first tried it – but sometimes, bread doesn’t exactly need to make sense. Biting into its precious heart, I was an immediate convert, with its harmony of mayo and chicken floss exploding with full force. The bread’s content might spill all over the place and look pretty plain next to your French boulangerie, but where flavor is concerned, there isn’t need for sourdough pretension. In DJ Bakery’s one playful statement, I was won over – that joy is not to be stolen by some fucking ants.

Arguably, Heureux Pour Vous have done the same with their latest. After mastering the palate, they go back to the most basic staple with attention for flavor, and despite its relatable and unadorned subject matter, it's fun, gets the job done, and just like every outlet’s signboard, its quality feels as if embossed with gold. Ants In My Bread feels the same - the bread of its subjects might be wack, but at least the starter was rock solid. That’s what it means to make it from scratch, bitch.

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