THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Acclaimed Manchester pop-rock outfit Pale Waves burst onto the scene in 2018 with the runaway success of their debut album My Mind Makes Noises. Two top five albums later, the band are back with a newfound maturity to accompany their fourth studio album Smitten.
While Pale Waves’ first three albums focused 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 Baron-Gracie 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.”
