Pale Waves

“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, these 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 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.” So much of Smitten captures the excitement and euphoria of early queer relationships; some of which come alongside confusion and pain.

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.”