Paris Paloma on the 'labour', trauma, and growth that birthed her debut album 'Cacophony' • Interview • DIY Magazine

For anyone familiar with the warm, folk-flecked output of Paris Paloma so far, it might come as a surprise to learn that the moniker she’s given her debut usually comes defined as a ‘mixture of loud, unpleasant sounds’. But, dig a little deeper into her first album ‘Cacophony’ and – Oxford Dictionary be damned – you’ll understand why the phrase would become the perfect, evocative title.

Digging, as it so happens, is an integral part of the 24-year-old singer’s first full-length. Written over the course of the past two years, ‘Cacophony’ may be Paris curating her opening body of work – “a central gathering point for all of my music so far” – but it also sees her embarking upon an intensely personal journey of her own. “There’s something very archaeological or anthropological about this album specifically,” she muses over coffee in a central London hotel bar, with just a month to go until the album’s release. “There’s lots of themes to do with burial and unearthing, digging back up and discovering remnants. That archaeological element is a lot to do with [the idea that] you bury things emotionally and you dig them up – it’s a cycle constantly.

“I’ve been in therapy for a long time, and you constantly revisit and excavate things all the time, or you bury them when you don’t want to deal with them,” she continues. “Then you dig them back up when you’re virtually a different person in your emotional journey, and it looks completely different when you do unearth it that time. I think that’s something I was feeling as I was curating the album. There’s a very animalistic, ancient tone to some of the songs that talk about the inevitability of that journey and [how] it’s not a bad thing. It’s all to do with healing.”

With its title inspired by Stephen Fry’s 2017 book of ancient Greek retellings, Mythos, and bearing reference to Joseph Campbell’s A Hero’s Journey Cacophony’ tells the story of Paris’ own path through trauma and growth, all while leaning on similarly mythological or historical metaphors. “I’ve always felt a need to place importance on things that everyone goes through but that are just invisible,” she notes. “Whether it’s historical, mythological or art historical, drawing from those things that exhibit the same themes – those human failings or imperfections of stories that happened time and time again – gives this platform, this validation to what is otherwise a very silent struggle in the human experience.

“I think that’s why, from when I started releasing music, I persistently would use metaphor and draw from Greek mythology, or literature, or art history, in order to tell the stories about ‘my little life’,” she continues. “It’s not little, it’s my entire universe – it’s these massive feelings – and people are just going through it every day and sweeping their feelings under the rug and thinking that it’s not important, whereas in myth and legends, people have felt this and it’s also very painful a lot of the time. I think that’s why I’m so drawn to those kinds of influences.”

“I’ve always felt a need to place importance on things that everyone goes through but that are just invisible.”

Curated to roughly tread a similar path as Campbell’s hero, ‘Cacophony’ deftly moves through the trials and darker moments that have littered Paris’ formative years. Opening with the haunting ‘my mind (now)’, its repeated chants of “What did I do wrong / Will you tell me what I did wrong?” feel stark and mesmeric ahead of the explosive sonics that soon kick in. The opening scene is set with “an absolute metamorphosis,” Paris says.“An electrical storm. The idea that every aspect of your brain chemistry is changing by something you’ve gone through; it’s not your nature but something’s happened in your environment that just absolutely rewires you. ‘my mind (now)’ is just incredibly painful, in a metamorphic sense, because you have to [change]. You sink or swim.”

From then on, she traverses intense feelings of isolation and loneliness (‘pleaser’), disconnect (‘his land’) and the ever-present threat of misogyny and the patriarchy, which looms large over the record as a whole. Yet, within the darkness, there are moments of light. Take ‘knitting song’, a tender love letter to the women in her life, which acts as a powerful reminder that – much like the law of conservation of energy, which claims energy can neither be created nor destroyed – love is similarly cyclical. “The love you receive from people – especially the women in your life – it never dies and you become it and it is reincarnated,” she notes. “‘knitting song’ is about that, and how I have so many wonderful female friendships who taught me what love is.”

It would be easy to assume that ‘Cacophony’’s pinnacle would arrive around ‘labour’; first released in March 2023, after a variety of viral successes it’s now been streamed over 150 million times on Spotify. But it’s her delicate, self-described “apocalypse trio” of tracks – ‘escape pod’, ‘last woman on earth’ and ‘bones on the beach’ – that cut the deepest. “Those three songs are all different reflections on the darkest point in my life,” Paris explains. “‘escape pod’ is isolation, it’s loneliness and this hopelessness; this grief that I was just carrying around all the time. ‘last woman…’ is the presence of patriarchy and the fact it’s never separate from your life when you’re a woman, that it shapes everything, while ‘bones on the beach’ is just the absolute exhaustion after all of that.“

‘last woman on earth’ is probably the song I feel most vulnerable about releasing on this album,” she notes pointedly of the track, which deals in the idea that, even after a woman has passed away, she can still be exploited and abused. Having originally shared a clip on social media during its earliest stages last year, the response from many of her female listeners was powerful. Since DIY’s interview, meanwhile, the singer has taken to social media to highlight the current epidemic of violence against women in the context of recent high profile news stories across the world, further contextualising the terrifying issue at the song’s heart.

“That song is an entire metaphor for the way that people talk about women, view them and treat them,” she explains today. “It’s so harrowing that that doesn’t even end in their death at all, whether it’s people like Marilyn Monroe or Amy Winehouse; they will continue to be exploited. It’s something that a lot of women and queer people are becoming incredibly vocal about, and the lack of tolerance that there should be for that. On a personal level, it’s the part of the album that deals with the role that patriarchal violence has played in stunting my personal growth. There’s just so much pain in that song that shouldn’t have to be there.”

“The love you receive from people — especially the women in your life — never dies.”

While the “apocalypse trio” unequivocally represents Paris’ most challenging moments, the tracks also helped to provide something of a turning point for the singer. They say the night is always darkest before the dawn, and it was only through romanticising the exhaustion – “the idea of just resting forever” – at the centre of ‘bones on the beach’ that she realised she was beginning to miss out on the moments that really mattered: “You can fall back in love with life,” she nods, “and you can find rest, and beauty, and sentience within life.”

Much like the final act of The Hero’s Journey, ‘Cacophony’’s closing track ‘the warmth’ sees Paris finally accepting her struggles and striving to move past them. “‘the warmth’ was specifically so profound to me because I’ve historically always been a really black and white person, where if I wasn’t completely better, I wasn’t better,” she notes. “While I struggle with OCD, and struggle with anxiety – and I did have depression for a long time – I would hold on to all the still-present aspects of those things and take it as symptoms meaning ‘I am not better yet’; that ‘better’ is some distant time in the future, if ever. ‘the warmth’ was when I was realising for the first time that they’re still there, but the warmth is returning to me.” It’s not so much the end of a journey as the realisation that life keeps playing on regardless of whether you try to stifle it. “The cold is still there, but it doesn’t present the threat that it once did.”

A brave, deeply personal examination of the pain and strife women and non-binary people are still faced with everyday, ‘Cacophony’ reflects Paris’ own journey to some form of self-acceptance: a feeling she wants to imbue listeners with, too. “I think, empathy for themselves,” she nods of her hopes for the album’s lingering message, “and to feel held by it. To feel whatever it is that they need to; to have whatever pain they feel be validated and heard. The artists I love the most are the ones who have articulated my pain in away that I couldn’t or haven’t done before – not even pain but my needs, my love, the mass of feelings I feel – and to share in it with people that they feel close to, to help them better understand each other.”

‘Cacophony’ is out now via Nettwerk.

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