Pale Waves, Unwanted ★★★☆☆
Whether by design or happy accident, this female-fronted quartet from Manchester have become one of the country’s biggest pop-punk bands through stealth: in an era when few guitar bands break through, their debut album, 2018’s My Mind Makes Noises, followed a synthy ’80s blueprint, before their influences gradually shifted towards ’90s grunge, and bankable alt-artists like Avril Lavigne, Sum 41, Paramore and, at a push, Green Day.
After last year’s Who Am I? hit the Top Three at home via the same label as The 1975 and Wolf Alice, this briskly executed follow-up duly secured the production services of LA hotshot Zakk Cervini, who cut his teeth with big Stateside acts like Blink 182 and Limp Bizkit, as well as British goth-pop chart-topper Yungblud.
Pale Waves are hardly the first band to offer themselves as a conduit for those teens and early-twentysomethings who feel alienated from their peers, and society in general, but Unwanted sees them go after that demographic with a vengeance, with a timely LBGTQ+ twist: 27-year-old singer Heather Baron-Gracie has explained how, for the first time, its songs arose from her exploration of relationships with women, while also reflecting drummer Ciára Doran’s recent transitioning.
With Cervini and LA gun-for-hire Sam de Jong co-writing throughout, however, the album is anything but a radical feminist blast à la Bikini Kill, more along the lines of one of Courtney Love’s air-brushed, songwriter-assisted solo outings, with all guns blazing for radio-friendliness.
While its inspiration by gender issues is doubtless genuine, these seem discreetly buried in the lyrics, far from the choruses, where more universal gripes prevail. For this listener, Unwanted calls to mind a Jacqueline Wilson novel transposed into an LP format, its 12 songs relentlessly circling over “difficult emotions” – awkwardness, rejection, and, yes, it’s okay to express your anger. And these, of course, are well-worn teen-pop topics already. Andrew Perry