Pale Waves – Smitten

★★☆

Released September 27th, 2024 on Dirty Hit Records

Poptimism has had quite the time over the past decade, hasn’t it? Not only did we all decide that the likes of Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga were just as worthy of critical respect and thinking as, I don’t know, Radiohead and Nirvana, we also decided that alternative/indie music was just all-around better with pop music embedded into it. So we got a whole pile of bands who borrowed shamelessly from the big pop sounds of the Eighties, a decade that just twenty short years ago had been derided as the nadir of pop culture. Some time around 2009-2010, Duran Duran started to garner as much cultural credit as Black Flag.

There have been a lot of successes in this, of course. Sure, the majority of listeners talk about Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift as though they’re the only people who have released albums during the year; K-Pop has become mainstream business; country dominates the Billboard charts by dint of being pop music with a twang. But we got the New Pornographers, Toro y Moi, and CHVRCHES out of it, right? Right?

There comes a point, though, where you have to wonder if it’s been worth it. Take Smitten, the latest from England’s Pale Waves, for example. They began as bouncy New Wavers, taking their cue from the decade of bands before them that had been mining the same territory. Any edges they might have had originally, however, have been sanded down smooth and comfortable. This is power pop for the playlist generation, tidy little bops that are as interchangeable from each other as they are from other groups out there doing the exact same thing. At best they come off as CHVRCHES knock-offs, at worst like B-side Taylor Swift with a big loud synth. Yes, yes, it’s all majestic pop gestures – but we live in a world where every second band is trying to trade on majestic pop gestures, and it all runs together into a big pile of slop. An AI could probably churn it out, if you gave it a big enough training set.

Look: if you like synth pop, there’s no reason you won’t at least find Smitten listenable. The conceit is cute enough, I suppose; singer Heather Baron-Gracie discovers one of her old teenage diaries and decides to use it as lyrics for an album. There’s nothing to grasp onto beyond that, though, so once you leave the bubble of hummable melodies and bog standard structures it dissolves quickly. We already have CHVRCHES. They already fill that big synth pop void, and they do it with a certain bite that Lauren Mayberry brings that is inimitable. Heather Baron-Gracie is no Lauren Mayberry. Pale Waves are no CHVRCHES. They are the band you bring on at the local community center in a town CHVRCHES don’t bring their tour to. Pop completionists will find some joy to be had in this record, but the rest of you will just find the sleepy same-old.