It's finally time. As Pale Waves release their debut album 'My Mind Makes Noises', you can read our August 2018 cover feature introducing the record online, in full.
Pale Waves want to be the biggest band in the world, but you probably already knew that. Their ambition has been clear since the opening shimmer of their signature banger ‘There’s A Honey’ dazzled into view back in February 2017. Their drive has been constant, from fearlessly supporting stablemates The 1975 on their trek across American academies and arenas with only one song to their name, through to releasing a steady stream of stone-cold pop classics, doused in red, black and blue. At every turn, they’ve commanded the spotlight and asked for more. They’ve been relentless, uncompromising and constant in their need to be heard. It’s why they’ve spent the past six months almost always on the road. It’s why their name is on the bill for pretty much every festival happening this summer.
All that, though, was leading to this - their debut album. Titled ‘My Mind Makes Noises’ and released on 14th September, the fourteen tracks come just a year and a half after that debut single, but the difference is huge. Pale Waves don’t just dream of being the biggest band in the world; they’re doing everything in their power to make it their reality.
“It feels crazy,” starts vocalist Heather Baron-Gracie. “Even when I’m listening to it on my phone, it’s still so odd to picture us with a full-length album of Pale Waves music. We’ve worked so hard for this to happen and now it’s actually, finally here,” she grins. Excited and nervous, but not in equal measures, you can tell the next few months are going to be tough for them, but the record is done, and now, they just have to wait.
“People have got this idea of us writing the same song but with a different title, which I think is funny,” she muses. “It’s just that we love major chords. We love pop music.” No song on ‘My Mind Makes Noises’ sounds like another. Not really. Sure, they’re all massive, immediate gems in pop’s crown jewels, shaped with that same magical Pale Waves toolkit, but each one has its own glimmering charm. “At the end of the day, we could do whatever,” she continues. “As long as it’s got my voice on it, then I guess it is Pale Waves, isn’t it?”
“We wanted to dive into different aspects of our sound,” Heather continues. “We wanted to show different personalities to our writing,” but none of that came from simply wanting to prove people wrong. Their world expanding at each twist and turn, every song still sounds like Pale Waves. “You shouldn’t listen to those people. We write pop music, and we want to sound like the same band. I’m sorry if that offends anyone. We have the same writers. We’re going to have a consistent sound. And I think that’s a good thing to do. We want to be recognisable. I wouldn’t want to throw some jazz number on the album... not yet anyway,” she smiles. “We’ve got a lot of groundwork to settle in before we start throwing those crazy shapes.”
“‘My Mind Makes Noises’ tells their story so far. You’ll recognise ‘Kiss’ as well as slightly reworked versions of ‘There’s A Honey’ and ‘Television Romance’, but apart from that, it’s all shiny and new. It’s looking towards a future where the name Pale Waves is up in lights. There are hints of what’s to come; whispers of a world bigger than even they could imagine.
“With this record, it’s going to display what we’re going to do on the next album and in the future,” says Heather. “We’re always growing as artists, growing as people, and that’s going to influence our writing.” The band are also ever-growing. “It’s going to be even more different on the second album, but it’s still going to sound like Pale Waves,” she promises. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…
No matter how hard it got, the band never thought about tapping the brakes. They’ve been hurtling forward since day one, always been in control of their ridiculous pace. “We knew our album had to come out around September or we’d be leaving it too late. I see a lot of bands doing that nowadays, and I think it’s a big mistake. You need to push yourself. At times, when we were recording the album and things got tough, I had to take myself aside, walk around outside and ask myself, am I really going to push myself this far? And I did. Every time. Because it’s the right time for us.”
“I know how some people see me onstage,” she continues. “They see how I dress and how I am sometimes, and I know they think ‘You know what, she’s confident and believes in herself’, but I think the people that try and present themselves as the most confident are always the ones that lack that assurance and self-esteem. I’ve struggled with that growing up and still do to this day. It’s slowly getting better, but I wish I had somebody to say,” she pauses. “I wish I had ‘Noises’ as a song in my life when I was seventeen. It would have helped me.”
Heather wrestles with self-doubt throughout the album. There’s uncertainty. There’s confusion. There’s loss, and feeling lost. One track, ‘Drive’, she describes as “part two of ‘Noises’”. “That’s where I am right now,” she explains. “I’m twenty-three, I don’t feel quite as sad, but I still feel the same. I needed to make that bold step because it’s going to serve my songwriting in the future. I do believe that the older you get and the more songs you write, you allow yourself to open up more. The easy thing to do is write about love. I feel it’s a lot more difficult for me to write about myself, how I feel, what I struggle with, what my flaws are and what my insecurities are, rather than talking about another person and how I feel about them.”
It’s the most personal song Pale Waves have released to date, and it comes at a time where they’re going to new places, playing to fields full of people who are basically strangers to them. Rather than hide it on the album, they’ve put it front and centre so the world can find it. Fearless but also coming from the gut, “it just really felt like the right time to release it,” says Heather. “We’d previously released a lot of songs that were about romantic relationships and I wanted to release a song that wasn’t just about that.”
And obviously, having learnt all the words, you know the title of the record comes from the song. “Ciara got ‘My Mind Makes Noises’ tattooed on her arm and to me, that put the nail in the coffin. The album had to be called that; it means so many different things to me. There are so many things going on inside my head, good and bad. My head just constantly feels like it’s a train that’s going full speed ahead. Sometimes that can be bad, sometimes that can be good, but that sentence just summed up the album. ‘My Mind Makes Noises’ is basically my world, my diary that you’re stepping inside. It’s all the noises that my mind has made.”
“I grew up in Preston, and that’s quite a small town. I felt like an outsider. I always felt like I stuck out because I didn’t dress how they dressed. In college, I didn’t want to socialise with loads of people. I didn’t want to exchange awkward conversations because I was so tired of that. I’d done all that in high school, so I took myself off to the music department and played piano for the whole thing. For most of the time, I was alone. That comes back to ‘Drive’ and the line ‘I like to be alone most of the time, talking to myself’.
She wasn’t even going to be in a band. Sure, she’s been playing guitar since she was a kid. Encouraged by her dad who also played, she had lessons, took the exams, wrote her first songs on it and uploaded covers to YouTube. She always intended to do it by herself and believed that she’d be a lone star. Then she met Ciara.
“Everyone kept coming up to me and saying you need to write an acoustic song for the album,” starts Heather. “And I knew I did; I just needed to finish the album first. I had an acoustic track ready to go, but I didn’t believe in it, so I ditched it and started again. I wrote ‘Karl’ in a day, and recorded it the next. Karl is my Grandad. He had a very traumatic life and well, I don’t like to say he killed himself because I’m in two minds about whether he did it on purpose or not, but he went too soon. Just seeing the effect it took on my mum’s life, her sister, her brother, and everyone around us... You know when you lose someone so close to you, and you feel like the world’s ending, and everyone is collapsing around you? That’s how it felt.”
The closing track of the record, it’s one of those stop-in-your-tracks moments that would fit nowhere else.
Pretty much everyone Heather has shown it to - Ciara, Heather’s mum (“It’s about her dad, so I felt like I had to get permission to use it”), her brother, Hugo, Charlie, her managers Mark Hayton and Jamie Oborne - cried when they heard it.
There’s also the shimmering daydream of ‘When Did I Lose It All’, the restrained haunt and wicked snarl of ‘She’ and the fizzing self-belief of ‘Black’. Once upon a time known as ‘You Don’t Love Us Anymore’, it growls: “I’m not changing, I’m just waiting to figure myself out.”
“There are a few tracks people won’t expect,” grins Heather, but as always, ”it’s still us. It’s still pop.” It’s still gigantic.
At this exact moment, jetlagged and off the back of a weekend that’s seen her band support The Cure at Hyde Park, play Belgium’s biggest festival Rock Werchter and take three flights to end up in Australia, the song that Heather is most excited by is ‘One More Time’.
But even that only lasts for a second.
‘My Mind Makes Noises’ is Heather’s life so far. “It’s a journey of my life, up until now.” The ambition has been a constant, unflinching partner in crime. “I’ve always had that ambition since I was a young child, not just since I joined Pale Waves. I’m Pale Waves’ biggest fan but when I was a young child, my family members, they would always ask me what I wanted to do when I was older. Did I want to follow in my mum’s footsteps, did I want to become a nurse? No, I want to be a musician. And a lot of the time, people would laugh at me. ‘There she is, dreaming again’, but I kept a steady faith. No, I’m serious. This is what I want to do, and this is what I’m going to be. And now look at me. I’m doing it. I’m living it. These days, you have to have ambition. You’ve got to believe in what you’re doing. It is tough sometimes.”
The band’s sudden rise has attracted criticism, an easy target for people who just see their super shiny exterior and nothing more, but there’s always been more to them than that. ‘My Mind Makes Noises’ takes that heart, that passion, that desire to be something new and something important, and makes it supersized.
For Heather, the record is about her life. Her doubts, her dreams, her nightmares. For those on the outside, it’s about finding the things that make them feel alive, even if that’s painful at times.
Pale Waves have achieved so much so soon, but really, everything starts here. It’s the first look we’ve had at just how big this band can be. It sees them pushing at the walls, bracing against the ceiling and hurtling towards the horizon. It’s full of spotlight superstardom, gleaming ambition and quiet moments of heartbreaking truth. It goes all in, all the time, just like Pale Waves. And they’re not stopping now.
Taken from the August 2018 issue of Dork. Order a copy below. Pale Waves' debut album 'My Mind Makes Noises' is out now.
Words: Ali Shutler
Pale Waves had a pencil-sketch plan for what their debut album should be before they started. The reality “is better”, says Heather, and not just because it actually exists. “We got to the studio, and I had a mini breakdown because I didn’t think we had enough songs that were good enough. Pressure really helped me. I needed the pressure. We got to that mental state where we all started to go a bit insane. We’d been in the same building for over a month, every day from 10 am to 11 pm, and as you can imagine, we were all going a bit mental.
No matter how hard it got, the band never thought about tapping the brakes. They’ve been hurtling forward since day one, always been in control of their ridiculous pace. “We knew our album had to come out around September or we’d be leaving it too late. I see a lot of bands doing that nowadays, and I think it’s a big mistake. You need to push yourself. At times, when we were recording the album and things got tough, I had to take myself aside, walk around outside and ask myself, am I really going to push myself this far? And I did. Every time. Because it’s the right time for us.”
