Pale Waves are officially back with their fourth album, Smitten, which was produced by Iain Berryman and acts as an “unapologetic celebration of queer love.”
Rather than leaning into the buoyant pop punk of 2022’s Unwanted, the U.K. quartet embraced heavier synths and guitars indebted to a specific lineage of ’80s bands (think the Cure and Cocteau Twins). You can hear that across their recent singles, too, as they get vulnerable about love, queerness, and growing up — the dizzying confusion of “Gravity,” the bright yearning of “Perfume,” and the reckless fun of “Kiss Me Again.” “[The song] is about enjoying a situation in your own messed up way that you know you shouldn’t be in — in my case having fun with a ‘straight’ girl,” bandleader Heather Baron-Gracie shares of the latter.
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Of the album, Baron-Gracie says, “I found myself writing about not just a certain time period, but my whole life, from years ago. 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. I feel like Smitten really summarized perfectly what I felt for others at a certain point.”
Stream Smitten below.