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English indie rockers Pale Waves have returned with their hotly anticipated third album, Unwanted. Across the record, the band cast off the guise of their early incarnation, the synthy, 1980s-inspired pop that positioned them as a sonic partner of their Dirty Hit label mates, The 1975. They have created a sound that is altogether new for the band, even if it might that output is eerily familiar to many of us.

Fans of the band will undoubtedly be lapping up the new sound of Pale Waves. Unwanted is brimming with anthemic pop hooks, heady textures, and a far heavier undercurrent than many would have thought possible, with drummer Ciára Doran shining throughout the record. 

If it wasn’t already made clear on the band’s previous two albums, 2018’s My Mind Makes Noises and 2021’s Who Am I?, Baron-Gracie, who is the group’s creative powerhouse, is not only a masterful songwriter but one hell of a vocalist as well. It is readily apparent that she’s coming into her own.  

“Unwanted is in your face, and that’s exactly what I wanted,” says lead singer Heather Baron-Gracie. “I want Pale Waves to keep growing in this direction. Bigger, bolder, and more unapologetic”.

Baron-Gracie was not wrong in her assertion. Unwanted is in your face, and it is more expansive and more honest than she and the group have ever been before, with cuts such as ‘Lies’, ‘Alone’, and ‘You’re So Vein’ confirming this. The sound of the guitars on the latter is so uncustomary for the band that they are not very different from those found on Nine Inch Nails’ pounding 2005 classic ‘The Hand That Feeds’.

However, one cannot escape the fact that the Unwanted is very derivative and was directly inspired by Y2K in all its brilliance and flaws. At the time of writing, Baron-Gracie listened to various bands such as Garbage, Paramore, and Metric. Whilst these were a deciding factor in her wanting to pull away from the synth-pop sound of their first two records, they’ve also been the record’s biggest downfall. 

When pastiche is done well, it is effective, but at many points across the album, you cannot escape the spectre of many of the worst acts of the turn of the millennium, and in particular that of Avril Lavigne’s early work. The song ‘Without You’ bears glaring stylistic similarities to ‘I’m With You’. Check the chord progression in the chorus; it is straight out of the Lavigne handbook. All this being said, it is an ear-worm.

As far as the essence of much of the album goes, it can be summed up by one song, Lavigne’s 2004 track ‘My Happy Ending’. There are many soft, emotionally affected verses, with a low pass filter at the end that then explodes into an impassioned chorus that discusses one-sided relationships and other pop-punk tropes we’ve heard a thousand times, as the title track confirms.

Added to this sentiment is that the record was recorded by pop-punk maestro Zakk Cervini whose credits include the likes of Blink-182 and Machine Gun Kelly, giving you a clear indication of where Unwanted sits stylistically. Of course, some moments deviate enough from the subject material, which confirm this is a Pale Waves record and not released by, say, Simple Plan, but broadly speaking, they are not enough to make you lose engagement.

That being said, such is the zeitgeist, and it is certain that the album will perform well. Y2K-think has recurred for the past couple of years because there’s an appetite for it. We’ve reached the age where the groups we loved as kids were at their pomp 20 years ago, leading to a nostalgia that’s not unwarranted.

Despite the criticisms that can be sent in the way of Unwanted, it is brimming with big choruses that are much more all-encompassing than what the band have produced before. It gives you a feeling that with their new opus, they’re about to break into the mainstream and become stadium-fillers. Pale Waves aren’t indie darlings anymore; they’ve changed course, and their future will be interesting.

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