Pale Waves are a four-piece band from Manchester made up of Heather Baron-Gracie, Ciara Doran, Hugo Silvani & Charlie Wood.
Their third studio album is a bold statement of reclamation – from the lyrics to the title itself. Unwanted reaches out into the community of misfits and LGBTQI fans, tapping into darker emotions than ever before while striking a fresh tone of defiance.
Since their 2018 debut My Mind Makes Noises, the band has grown to embrace their queerness, with lead singer Heather Baron-Gracie writing more directly about her relationships with women. Meanwhile, drummer Ciára Doran has been posting updates about their transition over the last year, from starting testosterone to recovering from top surgery. These experiences have shaped Pale Waves’ music over the last few years, but they jump to the fore on Unwanted. Unwanted is 13 tracks of classic pop punk with an edge.
Think Sum-41 by way of Veruca Salt; all the crunchy guitars and rhythmic drive of a 2000s pop punk classic with the rage of a 90s rock band. At the time of writing, Baron-Gracie was listening to a lot of Garbage, Paramore, Metric, Sky Ferreira and Blondie – artists that fed into her desire to pull Pale Waves out of the indie and synth-pop world they started out in, and towards a harder, more alternative sound. “Unwanted is in your face, and that's exactly what I wanted,” Baron-Gracie says resolutely. “I want Pale Waves to keep growing in this direction. Bigger, bolder, and more unapologetic.”
While Pale Waves’ first three albums focussed on the band’s immediate present, Smitten is a lot more preoccupied with past lives – some more recent than others. Written two years after Unwanted, and after the tour that followed, Heather found herself in a headspace where she could finally breathe, and reflect, like peeling through the pages of a long-forgotten teenage diary and being surprised by what she found. “I found myself writing about not just a certain time period, but my whole life, from years ago,” she says. “When I fall in love, I fall deep, and it’s interesting to me that you can feel so fascinated and smitten with someone and then they can become a total stranger. So I feel like Smitten really summarised perfectly what I felt for others at a certain point.”
Ultimately, Smitten is Pale Waves at their realest and most grounded. The songs sparkle with an intense emotional resonance that was only possible to express from a place of relative calm. “For this fourth album, I didn’t really feel the pressure,” says Heather. “I had a lot of time to try things out for size. Me and the band figured out what works for us. Smitten is different [from anything else we’ve done] because you can hear the freedom that we all feel – it’s not trying to be anything. We wanted to put that into existence.”
