A practiced listener conducting a careful listen will discern a noted difference between U.K. alternative rock quartet Pale Waves’ 2021 Who Am I? and their third album, 2022’s Unwanted. The cranked amps, rougher edges, and harder crashes of the band’s sophomore album are just as central and explosive in the new project, but the albums’ dispositions are markedly distinct: if Who Am I? was a journal chronicling the falling in of love, Unwanted is the falling out of love. Heather Baron-Gracie, the group’s frontwoman, sustains her intimate and vulnerable approach to storytelling, but the emotions confided in her lyricism are of the darker persuasion: “loss, vanity, anger, jealousy and hopelessness.”
Unwanted expands Pale Waves’ study of pop-punk – a project propelled with a bang on 2021’s Who Am I? The band – hailing originally from Manchester in the U.K. – recorded their third album with Blink-182, Halsey, and Machine Gun Kelly producer Zakk Cervini in Los Angeles. From rage-soaked anthems that speak to and validate your feelings over betrayals by trusted lovers and friends, to ballads of empathy, reaching through the speaker to check in on your mental health and remind you that you are not alone – this is Pale Waves’ Unwanted.
The album roars to life with “Jealousy,” a slinking then prowling admonishment of an ex-lovers’ hollow words and promises, that rears its heaviest fed-up and take-my-power-back head in the chorus as Gracie sings, “All your lies, they just caught up with you”, atop drummer Ciara Doran’s pounding drums. “Unwanted” follows and develops the thematic content and sonic structures of the opening number; guitarist Hugo Silvani’s metallic, distorted rhythms leap to the fore and build on Doran’s raw, unapologetic beats, while Gracie identifies the effects her exes’ forms of mistreatment have on her.
Breaking from the opacity of righteous resentment on “The Hard Way,” Gracie rethinks her silence and acceptance in a high school friendship; in recognizing the dangerousness of not reaching out to somebody who appears to be fine while suffering abuse, the songwriter instructs her listeners to do just that. The fourth track, single “Jealousy,” grabs and pulls the listener to an until now, unencountered corner of Unwanted’s basket of dark but needed dialogues: an alpha voice describes their desired (consensual) ownership of a part-time lover. On the eroticism of jealousy the frontwoman reasons, “it shows me the person only has eyes for me and me only.”
The album returns the listener to more familiar territory on the following number, “Alone,” wherein Gracie, while weathering a bout of her partner’s crocodile tear apologia post fucking up, in fantasy, returns to the moment the two had met, and fiercely rebukes their affection: “I’d rather spend my entire lifetime alone.” A signature soundscape of Pale Waves’, bassist Charlie Wood’s twinkling lines and Silvani’s sparse, fairylike riffs flowing into the whole band firing harmoniously on all cylinders, presents itself on “Clean,” a track communicating Gracie’s inability to quit returning to – become sober of – an addictive partner. Instrumentation and barriers strip away on “Without You”: songwriter Gracie offers up in raw, bleeding sincerity the trials of piecing the foreign fragments of oneself into a recognizable person after a long-term partner, whom one has grown beside and been changed by, walks out on the life you’ve built and future, planned.
“Only Problem,” Unwanted’s eighth track, encapsulates the album’s sonic interests and stands as one synecdoche of its thematic aim: Silvani’s pure, metallic riffs, Doran’s brazen, frenetic playing and Gracie’s coy yet gritty representation of a lover who must yet cannot be ignored, provide an embodiment of Pale Waves’ pressing preoccupations. The quartet flirt harder with tongue-and-cheek pop punk in the model of early 2000s Avril Lavigne on “You’re So Vain”: “I’m a princess so gimme my crown”, teases Gracie, voice metallic and reverberating, atop the album’s signature crunchy guitar riffs, punching drums and fuzzing, heavy metal production. Choppy yet harmonious synthesis between Silvani, Dorian and Wood follow through to “Reasons To Live,” but Gracie pierces the opacity of darker sentiments by providing a glimmer of hope, a reminder of community as on “The Hard Way,” through lyrical accounts of times when a beloved one helped her out of somber places.
Unwanted’s eleventh song, “Numb,” carries the diary-like approach to song-writing of “Without You”; Gracie generously offers the listener observation of her lying in the space between life and nothingness, slogging from one spot of grey mundaneness to the next and finding a (fleeting) saviour in drink and sleep. Pale Waves thread the threads of blaring metal ire and spacious, haunting unknowingness – once again – on “Act My Age,” a dialogue between cautious, crawling verses and untethered, explosive choruses, yet the acute bandage-rip of ponderances such as “Where did all the time go?” and “Better get my shit together now” puncture particularly hard. Closing the album is the ultimate catharsis, the conclusion statement of the quartet’s study of deeply rooted, uncomfortable to unsettle conceptions through a tenderly individualist lens: “So Sick (Of Missing You)”; a sonic linkage to Who Am I?’s acoustic dreamscape; unfurls Gracie’s cornucopia of betrayal, fatigue, nostalgia and perceptible, resignation.
You can stream “Unwanted” below:
