Manchester’s Pale Waves may not have an original idea in their bag of indie-pop/rock tricks but that doesn’t mean to say they can’t shake it up like the best of their influences (think My Chemical Romance, Avril Lavigne, Green Day, Paramore, Hole). Their third album (in four years, which makes them busy bees if nothing else) will assuredly go the way of their previous two: 2018′s debut My Mind Makes Noises and 2021′s Who Am I? cracked the UK Top 10 charts, making them one of the most successful UK bands of recent times.
Given the generic quality of the music that’s understandable, but there’s something else here that gives them an extra push: lead singer Heather Baron-Grace. She is a Lancashire lass with LGBTQ+ aesthetics tattooed on her skin (“when I came out of the womb I knew I was gay”, she informed Vanity Fair last year). There is a convincing quality to the way the songs are delivered (further enforced by the band’s videos, in which Baron-Grace does a good job of emulating the likes of Courtney Love and a few others) even if you know where the music shapes are from. This said, you’d have to be a cranky sort not to be half-swayed by songs as punk/pop-friendly as Clean, Jealousy, Reasons to Live, Act My Age, Lies and the (initial) softer edges of The Hard Way.
