Paris Paloma Cacophony North American Tour

As she watched friends skim stones on Brighton Beach, Paris Paloma felt energy shift. Like heat returning to numb fingertips, life felt like it was taking shape again after a long period of personal trauma. With a diaphanous sheath of lyrics in mind, she went to Bergen, Norway to work on new music. On the three days of the year that it didn’t rain in Europe’s wettest city, among the silvery lakes and mountain peaks, life grew ever brighter. “the warmth” was formed.

“I ate up all the light, it shone through my teeth, I tasted sunbeams emanating from me… it can’t hurt me… now the warmth is returning,” she sings in unfurling harmonies, spectral with full-bodied pop, a determined percussive march building like a personal artillery. This emotional arc would be core to Paris Paloma’s debut album, cacophony.

The Derbyshire-born musician gave the world “labour” in 2023. It was the first song she’d ever fully recorded in a proper studio – early releases like “narcissus” in 2020, 2021 EP cemeteries and socials, and 2023’s “notre dame” were produced in her own bedroom or others’. But early clips she posted with stolen lyrics of “labour” to TikTok had already garnered a curious audience. Its journal-like lyricism and incisive strain of compelling, dark folk-pop skewered the knots of women’s emotional labour, and it immediately became a rallying cry worldwide upon official release. The track broke over 100 million streams on Spotify, cracked the Official UK Singles Chart and US Billboard Chart, and soundtracked tens of thousands of TikToks. It spurred on sold-out shows around the UK, and Paris, armed with a compact slew of songs, travelled to the US and Australia for the festival circuit. “I matured because of ‘labour’,” Paris explains. “As a young artist you’re both protected and limited – you’re putting songs that are so intimate into a void. It’s made me more considerate about how vulnerable these songs are going to be.”

Such vulnerability can be difficult to confront, and all the more to articulate as art, “but I feel very held by my listeners,” Paris says. This symbiotic care between artist and listener is innate within Paris’s devoted fanbase. She’s cultivated a community both online and off: on TikTok, her 400K followers send her videos (of thoughts, song snippets, and tour moments) into six- figure views. Fan-made art and videos analysing her lyrics span social media. She’s also crowdsourced the voices of hundreds of fans for a new version of “labour” to be released. These are roots laid deep, as Paris gains wider recognition from NME to Billboard, as YouTube’s Trending Artist on the Rise and a Breakthrough Artist to Watch 2024 by Amazon.

A graduate of fine art from Goldsmiths University (her first tattoo was a tribute to female surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun), Paris’s creative mediums have influenced each other since she first started writing songs at age 14. Her early releases’ visual identities are crafted from her own fantasy drawings. Now, cacophony is inspired by the creation that comes out of chaos – in 15 tracks, we’re shown Paris as an evocative lyricist who constellates human experiences of grief, love, patriarchy, and trauma with Greek mythology, fantasy, and the literary gothic. The album name is inspired by Stephen Fry’s Mythos, ruminating on the creation myth. “From this chaotic cosmic yawn, creation sprang forth,” Paris explains, “so this is a collection that makes sense of the overwhelming space of my mind where my anxiety, my OCD, and trauma processing lives.” Songwriting is a catharsis and coping mechanism, which she uses to articulate her struggles in real time. The sprawling metaphor of chaos to creation knits the album’s universe together.

“As I began to combine songs, I could see my struggles, the fantasy, the ‘hero’s journey’.” Paris found tracks incidentally informing each other, and so the album has been curated rather than conceptualised to find a natural rhythm akin to Greek theatre staging – or “a quest”, as Paris puts it. “I love linear storytelling, following the protagonist inflected by a journey. Looking back, I can track my own wellbeing, my growth.” Album opener “my mind (now)” and closer “yeti” are opposites: “We start with the turmoil, open up the chaos, scramble back to redemption and healing.” She describes her songwriting as undisciplined, but always begins with lyrics – a starting couplet or image to elucidate. Melody follows.

“My mind has not been silent since you,” she sings vaporously on “my mind (now)”. A haunting fugue draws you in: “What did I do wrong”, across skittering percussion and a glut of trumpets, lanced by crunching guitars and a piercing feral scream. She flexes her songwriting dichotomy, weaving the personal with haunting symbolism – a striking image of strawberry picking while someone else readies their cruelty. “boys, bugs, and men” draws on men’s sadistic behaviours, using natural world imagery to unspool the banalities of a patriarchy that hurts both genders.

“I love the feral, feminine aspects of my music,” says Paris. “Being unapologetically vulnerable feels wild – it's breaking down boundaries, a return to something primal.”

“bones on the beach” is a “turning point”. “I wrote it at a time when I was coming out of survival mode,” she explains. “It starts from exhaustion and wanting the world to stop asking things of you. And as it progresses, there’s a realisation – you will find peace in life when you start living and taking care of yourself.”

Three album tracks – “escape pod”, “last woman on earth”, “bones on the beach” – are her ‘apocalypse trio’. “When it felt like my world was ending,” she says. “last woman on earth” is an emotive, upward contour, about coping with and confronting the ways her voice has been taken away. She leans on dark metaphors to find light. “Women’s wishes for what happens after they die have been consistently dishonoured: from Anne Boleyn to Marilyn Monroe. It's the ultimate show of disrespect,” she says. “It becomes an uplifting point – it shows my growing belief in my own agency.”

“triassic love song” is an aching ode to external love returning to her life, imagery inspired by an archaeological discovery of two fossils of different animal species intertwined. “It’s a tender narrative marker. Love was becoming a healing force, but I was conscious of an end being nigh.”

She matches this with expansive productions – dramatic instrumentation, folk sensibilities, pop at its most cavernous. It makes sense for someone who first picked up a guitar at age 13, enamoured by Ed Sheeran, Bon Iver, and the eclectic sounds of her upbringing from the Motown and jazz her mother played. “my mind (now)” was especially fun to build. Paris recalls: “I didn’t want any structure that could be a ‘life raft’. It has to almost overwhelm you, then pull back. You're a tiny raft in the ocean, you're surely going to go under – but you don't.”

After building a song out on vocals and guitar, her notes app and songbook, she makes a playlist to convey the sonic palette. “as good a reason” was inspired by Alt-J and early Hozier;