British Indie Musician Paris Paloma On The New Sound Of Sisterhood
Her song Labour gave a voice to generations of women grappling with exploitation and exhaustion. Now, PARIS PALOMA is heading in a new direction. She tells NATASHA BIRD about building a community for catharsis, healing and facing what’s ahead
With a new school year on the horizon, British musician Paris Paloma has set her sights on teaching herself – and others – how to prioritize love. In this self-styled syllabus, she’s constructing building blocks for community, holding people through emotional journeys and creating bubbles of joy and safety, in a world that sometimes feels anything but.
“All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid, nymph, then virgin, nurse, then a servant” – her 2023 song, Labour, landed loudly; a reverberating chant that seemed to perfectly decipher a sense of ancient, bone-deep toil, physical and emotional, eternally expected of women and interminably taken for granted.
“I think I just wanted to name something,” Paloma says of the moment. “I wanted to validate not just the imbalance of domestic labor, but the way women felt about that. I wanted to validate any woman feeling exploited.” Labour was not only about one kind of inequal marriage, or one kind of man, or one kind of woman’s exhaustion. Paloma wanted it to hold “all manner of experiences”: relationships that were “toxic, abusive”, but also those that were simply “loveless or lonely”. What she could not have known was just how many women were waiting for the precision of her validation.
“I want people coming into shows to feel like they are stepping into this sublime world where they are allowed to feel their emotions as big as they get”
When the song began to go stratospheric, Paloma was at her family home, staying with her mother. “It was so bizarre,” she says. “I remember dissociating for a couple of weeks because it was kind of blowing up around me.” But beyond the success of her art, the overall impression she had was of “this immense collective relief that women felt at joining together to point out this feeling.”
She describes Labour as a “lightning rod”, and it is a good simile. The song hit culture at a moment when it was fit to be ignited. And yet, if you watch footage of her performing it live, it isn’t just fury being shouted back at her by those crowding the stage. There is a strange, luminous softness too. Women holding hands. Women chanting in unison. Women finding a kind of safety in the whole experience. “I’ve always felt this yearning for group catharsis in a way that our culture doesn’t really support,” Paloma says. “I’m so glad that my shows are somewhere I’ve managed to carve out that culture.”
And so, the next era of sisterhood begins. Paloma is in the process of trying to harness some of that warmth and closeness she recognized at her concerts. “It’s amazing to have that moment of release,” she says, “holding hands with fellow women and allies and people of all genders who come to the shows. In that moment people are committing to be in solidarity with one another.”
For her next album, The Fatal Flaw, and a tour that will take this community into grander rooms, Paloma is thinking expansively about how to join the dots between all these gorgeous pockets of people, globally. The new record, she says, was inspired in part by the philosopher bell hooks, particularly the idea of love as “the extension of the self or expansion.”
“The first album was very much detailing this explosion of things inside my mind,” Paloma says. “It was my inner world, pouring all of that out. Whereas this album engages a lot more acutely with my relationship with other people.” For Paloma, working with “love” as a source concept does not mean retreating from a world view. “There is a lot about dysfunctional love, painful love, things misdiagnosed as love,” which is both intricate and universal.
It is an elegant pivot. From the blunt-force question – why are women carrying so much? – to a tender follow-up: what would it look like if women felt safe enough to put some of it down? “I want people coming into shows to feel like they are stepping into this sublime world where they are allowed to feel their emotions as big as they get,” she says. “I can really foresee this album being a home for that.”
“Fashion is a story, fashion is a statement… I see fashion as part of the world-building of my projects”
The ‘sublime’ is an idea that meanders through Paloma’s work. Her music has always had the drama of myth and the intimacy of confession. It’s all very atmospheric. Fashion is a huge part of the worlds she creates. As a former art-school student, she approaches storytelling through a visual lens. “Fashion is a story, fashion is a statement,” she says. “I’m not someone who wants to get buried in labels and fashion houses without there being reasons behind them, because I see fashion as part of the world-building of my projects.”
It is also part of her developing manifesto – that women should be able to reclaim joy and artistry, and autonomy in all things. “I have to be at the helm of this ship, because I’m a woman. People will take advantage of that. I want to make sure that I’m always granting myself full autonomy. It’s the first thing I tell younger female artists too.”
“I want to be building what would have helped me when I was in my teens,” she says. “What would have made me feel held and seen and empowered and safe.”
As she approaches her new tour, it feels like just the thing that could define her lasting cultural impact. Labour articulated a wound with searing accuracy. This next chapter, though, is about healing. It is about harnessing women’s emotions, their vulnerability, their contradictions, and weaving it into something with forward-momentum. “With this next album,” Paloma says, “I have a captive audience. I want to write about patriarchy still, but I want to write about feelings in a nuanced way. What does it actually look like when we’re building community?” The door she first opened might have been to a rage-room full of proverbial smashing plates, but the world she’s constructing behind this second door is a place for holding hands as we forge ahead.
Paris Paloma’s new album, The Fatal Flaw, is out September 4th. Tickets for her North American, UK and European tour are on sale now.