Manchester four-piece Pale Waves are back with their fourth studio album Smitten, the follow up to their 2022 pop-punk influenced record Unwanted.

EPSG:4326

Pale Waves

O2 Institute Birmingham

“Feeling naked, dressed up head to toe/It’s been a while since I’ve been this vulnerable,” sings Heather Baron-Gracie – of the British alt-rock four-piece Pale Waves (Heather, Ciara Doran, Hugo Silvani, Charlie Wood) on “Seeing Stars”, a gorgeously melodic slice of dream-pop about opening yourself up to love, heartbreak and self-discovery. In many ways, the se are the themes that define their fourth album Smitten: vulnerability, love, sexuality, queerness, finding yourself, moving on, growing up. “I was reading a lot of sapphic poetry and queer films and just being ultra queer,” Heather says today. “I feel like that unlocked a lot of my past experiences with women that have been in my life, that I’ve been in relationships with and that I’ve been in love with.”  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 head space where she could finally breathe, and reflect, like peeling through the pages of along -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. “WhenI 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.” So much of Smitten captures the excitement and euphoria of early queer relationships; some of which come alongside confusion and pain. On lead single “Perfume”, an infectious 1980s -leaning anthem reminiscent of bands like The Cure and The Cranberries, Heather sings about being totally enamoured with a person: “My mother says that when I want something I never let it go/Call me obsessed but I don’t mind just as long as it’s all mine.”

Pale Waves

Oct 15, 2024

Pale Waves

Oct 6, 2024

Pale Waves

Pale Waves