Pale Waves - My Mind Makes Noises

The Guardian 60

(Dirty Hit)

“What do you see when you look at me?” asks Heather Baron-Gracie on the Manchester quartet Pale Waves’s debut single, There’s a Honey. That’s easy: a resplendent, classic goth. Were she to ask, though, “What do you hear when you listen to me?”, the answer would be, confusingly: perfect millennial pop.

Pale Waves’s black-clad central songwriting duo, Baron-Gracie and Ciara Doran, are perhaps the apotheosis of the death of musical tribes among digital natives. There are flourishes of pop Cure on the likes of Kiss, which doffs its cap to Just Like Heaven, but most tracks here could grace Taylor Swift’s 1989. Their biggest single, Television Romance, remains monstrously addictive, all glistening 80s pop muscle and deadpan delivery, but there’s plenty to match it, from the crisp synths of Came In Close (which features the killer line: “I knew from the very first time I saw you / You liked crying in your room for something to do”)and theyoung-love rush of Eighteen to Loveless Girl’s dry jabs at an old flame: “You always said I was too cold/ Only with you, though”.

Sun Sep 16 07:00:23 GMT 2018

The Guardian 40

The super-hyped Manchester quartet have some nice melodies, but can’t yet craft songs – and you’ll need to be a heartsick emo teenager to endure the lyrics

It’s fair to say a striking disparity exists between Pale Waves’ appearance and the way they sound. Singer Heather Baron-Gracie and drummer Ciará Doran look like goths. Not a bit goth, as in a liking for black clothes, not goth in the tasteful latterday fashion-magazine sense, but goth as in Whitby-weekender, pint-of-snakebite-and-black-please, off-to-a-club-called-Cobwebz-to-wave-your-arms-around-to-Bela-Lugosi’s-Dead goth: a riot of black lipstick, white foundation and fishnet.

Related: Sign up for the Sleeve Notes email: music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras

Thu Sep 13 11:00:18 GMT 2018