Heather Baron-Gracie doesn’t know much about astrology. “I just know I’m a Capricorn,” the 26-year-old lead singer of U.K.-based band Pale Waves tells me. “My fans made me a birth chart because they knew I have no knowledge of star signs.”
From the outside looking in, though, the cosmos was almost uniquely aligned against the creation of Pale Waves’ second studio album, Who Am I?, out this Friday. Last February, a tour-bus crash involving the other three members of the Pale Waves quartet—Ciara Doran, Hugo Silvani, and Charlie Woods—sidelined the band for several weeks. Then the pandemic cut their L.A. recording sessions short; half the band flew home, afraid of getting stuck Stateside, and half remained in California, necessitating a Frankensteining of recordings made on different continents. And of course, the pandemic hit its stride in L.A. as Baron-Gracie was finalizing the album last spring. “It was just me and a producer in masks and gloves,” she says. “I mainly stayed in the vocal booth. We were washing our hands every second.”
Ultimately, though, her Earth sign nature prevailed. “I remember my manager ringing me up and being like, What should we do?” she says. “And I was like, There’s no option here. I’m going into the studio, and I’m going to finish it.”
Who Am I? is a harder sound for Pale Waves—grungier, with a pop-punk sensibility and visuals that would be at home in a Tim Burton film. The titular “Who Am I?” is a true ballad, but the rest of the album—a nostalgic mishmash of Avril Lavigne and Hayley Williams with some Brand New melancholia thrown in—stays upbeat. “Change,” the opening song, is Pale Waves’ typical mix of light and dark: a cheery melody paired with lyrics despairing of a dysfunctional relationship. “You Don’t Own Me” is a giant “fuck you” to the patriarchy, but in a tempo that invites you to jump around your bedroom singing into a hairbrush. “She’s My Religion” is a love song with a twist; the music video, set on a misty winding road, in a deserted meadow, and in a dimly lit country house, screams romantic tragedy, while the accompanying words speak of loving someone despite their flaws. For Baron-Gracie, this type of combination is deliberate. “The instrumentation is quite uplifting and positive and euphoric, and the songwriting tends to be darker,” she explains. “I try to balance it…. I’m a crier—I’ll literally cry at anything on TV. I love those kinds of songs. But I don’t want a full record of people crying.”
Still, parts of the album are tear-jerking. “She’s My Religion,” the queer emo anthem of my teenage dreams, is shot through with emotion, a musical love letter to Baron-Gracie’s girlfriend, Kelsi Luck. (For the record, Luck is a Pisces.) Luck’s starring role in the song’s music video is her most obvious contribution, but Baron-Gracie tells me that Luck’s fingerprints are all over the album. She had “fallen a bit out of love with music,” until Luck “had artistic, creative conversations with me that made me become a better writer.” Part of this, she says, was a poetry binge—Luck had her read “poems that had really meant something to her. ‘You Don’t Own Me’ was inspired by a poem she wrote about what it’s like to be a woman in the world. And ‘Wish You Were Here’ was a poem she wrote about me that I secretly recorded on my phone. She had no idea. I was like, ‘Can you just read me that poem again?’… Later on she discovered that I’d put it in a song and at first she was like, ‘Take it out. I don’t want it in there.’”
“She’s very much a girl who wants to be behind the camera and not in front of it, and that’s why our relationship works so well,” Baron-Gracie says. “We’ll create this whole world, and then I go and perform it. It’s the perfect relationship for me…. I wouldn’t have this record if it wasn’t for Kelsi.”
In fact, the two intended to tie the knot last March—yet another plan derailed by the pandemic. “We were going to get married in Vegas,” Baron-Gracie says. “I wanted a trashy wedding, and I’m annoyed that it didn’t happen.” The moment for Vegas “has passed,” she says, but they’ll figure out another way to get hitched down the line. “You know how gay relationships go; you meet that person and you’re like, ‘Let’s move in together,’” she jokes. But she feels rock-solid in Luck: “When you establish that mutual respect for one another, it is really beautiful.”
This type of openness, both in interviews and in her songwriting, is relatively new for Baron-Gracie. Though she’s been out for years—“Yes I’m gay” she tweeted in November 2018, a delightfully nonchalant move rivaled only by Kristen Stewart’s “I’m, like, so gay, dude” on Saturday Night Live—this is the first time she’s been deliberately vocal about this aspect of her identity. “When I wrote the first Pale Waves album [My Mind Makes Noises, released in 2018,] I felt very young,” she says to explain the shift. “I was aware of my sexuality, but I hadn’t yet owned it. I had a lot more to explore and experience. I didn’t have anyone to write about.” In the interim, she’s become more comfortable in her own skin. “Too many people think I’m straight and I’m like, really? Most are men. [I’m like,] I’m not straight; I ain’t going to get with you…. I’ve always been gay. When I came out of the womb I knew I was gay.”