On their second album, 2021’s Who Am I?, and follow-up Unwanted (2022), Pale Waves presented a tough, punk-pop- and rock-informed exterior for singer Heather Baron-Gracie’s emotionally bare confessionals. Fourth album Smitten, however, finds the Manchester quartet back wandering through the gothic spires and ethereal dream pop that had marked 2018 debut My Mind Makes Noises. Epic, swooning and romantic, the likes of “Perfume”, “Gravity” and “Seeing Stars” sparkle with an iridescent colour palette, blending shades of jangling ’80s indie pop, Cure-like atmospherics and lush, Cocteau Twins-inspired washes of sound. “I wanted this record to sound very British,” Baron-Gracie tells Apple Music. “The visuals of the album came first for me before the music. I wanted it to look grand, like the English countryside, and romantic and feminine and just beautiful. That came before any of the music. Once I had that imagery, I moved on to the music.” With the sonic architecture for the record in place, Baron-Gracie penned a set of songs that looked back across the key moments and relationships of her past, taking stock and reassessing the person she was with a new perspective as she approached her thirties. “I don’t think I could have written these songs at any other point in my life until now, I would have justified a lot of things and made excuses,” she says. “I thought it was important for me to look back at a lot of my life, because I’ve had some huge experiences that I haven’t ever written about. I felt comfortable, and I felt in a good position in my life to be able to do that this time around.” Read on as Baron-Gracie takes us on a tour of Smitten, track by track. “Glasgow” “A lot of the songs are looking back at certain moments. ‘Glasgow’ is about a situation I had with another woman. It was a quite brief encounter, but it felt amazing and then, all of a sudden, it came crashing down. We both had a realisation that this definitely wasn’t going to work, that our personalities were never going to work together and, if we carried this on, we would’ve burnt everything down in flames. It could have just gone totally toxic and, at that point, I just don’t think I was ready to add any more toxic feelings into my life.” “Not a Love Song” “This is a ‘fuck you’ song. I fall hard and I fall deep, and I did in this situation. Behind closed doors, I was the one and only, I was the person that this person was willing to commit to and she adored me, but then in front of everyone else I was nobody. That really frustrated me, and I would question myself, ‘Am I not good enough? Why do you want me behind closed doors, but then you don’t when anyone else is around, and then you chase boys to just piss me off?’ I had to list all of these amazing things that I could’ve been and that she’ll never be able to get from me anymore.” “Gravity” “The story in ‘Gravity’ is about me and another woman. She was religious but also secretly gay. Her family were very religious too, and she couldn’t choose between me and her religion and her family and her world outside of me. In the end, it was too much for her and she chose her religion over me. I wanted the song to feel quite religious so that’s why it has all the stacks of the harmonies. You can imagine those harmonies being sung in church.” “Thinking About You” “We’ve had multiple versions of all of the songs on this record. I think that’s why it’s our strongest record, because these songs have been worked through again and again and again and had so many different personalities and so many changes. So much thought and consideration has gone into them. The original version of this was a straight-up acoustic ballad. In the studio, everyone started to say that it didn’t fit with the rest of the record, but I was so attached to this song from day one. I felt a weird connection to it, so we had to rework it with this guitar riff. It was perfect, it made the record better.” “Perfume” “‘Perfume’ had to be the first single for Smitten. It was the star of the show for me. It sets up this expectation for the record and it captures everything that’s going to follow. It’s romantic, it’s feminine, it’s dreamy, it’s grand. It paints the perfect picture. It’s all the things I love about music in this one track. ‘Perfume’ is about that infatuation you get, it’s a need, it’s a want. It’s lust as well. It’s all these falling-in-love moments captured in a song. The lyrics and the music take you on that roller coaster that you go through when you meet someone for the first time.” “Last Train Home” “It’s about a situation when I was just figuring out my sexuality and this was the first girl that I was figuring that out with. She had already embraced it and was confident with who she was and her sexuality, but I definitely wasn’t there. I couldn’t commit to her the way she wanted me to. I wasn’t ready to walk down the street holding her hand and I kept her a secret. I feel incredibly guilty and ashamed about that, but I just wasn’t ready. I broke her heart because I wasn’t confident or strong enough yet. It took me a few years to get there and to get comfortable, but I definitely wasn’t ready when I was in my early twenties. But everyone’s different. Some people instantly feel comfortable with it. Others take a few years. Others take decades.” “Kiss Me Again” “I wanted a really fun song on the record. We’ve been rehearsing this, and it’s really fun to play live as well. It was about a time where I knew this girl was just having me on for fun and as her little experiment but, at the time, I just didn’t care because I just wanted her attention and her touch. She was willing to give it to me, and I wasn’t willing to think about it at all. I just dived in deep and didn’t really think about it. And I didn’t want to, either.” “Miss America” “It’s definitely the most aggressive song on the record. We had so many dreamy songs that we felt we had the space to write something a bit more aggressive that would translate really well live. We always think about how things are going to be received live, and people love an upbeat, aggressive moment in a set. We like to intertwine a lot of things in our music. The lyrics are very delicate and honest and raw, about me holding my hands up about being a shit person. But then we contrast it with this music that is very in your face, punchy and aggressive.” “Hate to Hurt You” “‘Hate to Hurt You’ was the last track that we wrote for Smitten. A lot of the songs are quite yearning and heartfelt. I love that kind of music. That’s what I listen to the most. But I felt like we had to give people a moment where they could dance. It’s about a situation where I want to leave, but I feel awful doing so. I’m kind of pushing and pulling: I don’t want to be here anymore. I’m looking at other people, but I respect you as person and I don’t want to upset you. I don’t want to cause you harm, but I’m causing you harm by staying in this longer than necessary.” “Seeing Stars” “After we finished touring Unwanted, I started going into the studio and writing. I didn’t know it was going to be Smitten at the time, it went through loads of different genres and cycles and it was only when we wrote ‘Seeing Stars’ that we realised: This is the kind of sound that we want for our fourth record. It was those big jangly guitars. Previously, I was trying for a more rock sound, and then I instantly heard these guitars and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what heaven sounds like…OK, this is what the record is going to be.’” “Imagination” “I was taking inspiration from a girl that I was infatuated with in high school who was straight. I was never going to be able to receive an ounce of her love in that way. Nor did I ever want to admit it to her because I knew that she was straight, she wasn’t queer. So, for me, the only way we could exist together was in my imagination, and that’s what inspired that song: when you know something is unachievable and it’s never going to happen. It’s that realisation.” “Slow” “‘Slow’ is very anthemic, and it felt like it had to be the song that we finished the record on. I didn’t want to end on the slow sad song, because we’ve done that in the past. We wrote this quite early on in the process, and we changed a lot of things about it in the studio. It was definitely more of an aggressive track previously, but I thought it sounded a bit too dad rock, so I wanted to strip away a lot of things about it. I replaced the riff and we replaced a lot of the other guitars. I changed the structure and I changed the lyrics as well. It is quite a defiant way to end the album. It’s kind of like, ‘OK, the record is done. I’ve said everything I need to say. I’m out of here now.’”