As far as wise elders blessing the spirit of your record go, they don’t come much more inspirational than legendary stage and screen actor Emma Thompson. Thompson can be found intoning the opening lines on ‘Good Boy’, Paris Paloma’s no-holds-barred takedown of the most toxic and ultimately futile elements of manosphere culture. Taken from the title of a viral 2025 essay by Guardian journalist Rebecca Shaw, Thompson sighs: “I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down / I just didn’t expect them to be such losers…”
“It pisses me off how ‘Good Boy’ just gets more relevant. I wrote it about how those men call themselves free thinkers, and yet I’ve never seen anybody more submissive than a fanboy of Andrew Tate,” Paloma elaborates, calling The Forty-Five from her bedroom where a hand-painted scenic backdrop, made during a teenage internship at the Royal Opera House, provides a suitably theatrical wallpaper for our chat. “There were 200 men outside the prison that Andrew Tate is currently in, all doing push-ups. It was the most little bitch thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And these are men who would supposedly call themselves alpha males. The mind boggles. I don’t know how anybody can’t see the hilarity and the tragedy in that.”
Photograph by Phoebe Fox
Tragedy, empathy, pain, fury and – yes – an occasional knowing wink are the ingredients that form the fiery backbone of the 26-year-old singer’s second record, ‘The Fatal Flaw’. An album steeped in history and mythology, it frequently draws parallels between centuries-old struggles and a broken modern world, holding patriarchal systems to account for the toll they continue to take. An ambitious, unapologetic call to arms, it makes sense that Paloma has been attracting like-minded women such as Thompson and recent tourmate Florence Welch to her artistic world. “When it comes to art, it’s all you can do to bring in people who align strongly and who just want to be a part of that message,” she says of Thompson’s involvement. “She’s equally incredibly worried about the state of the manosphere and it’s something that we’ve spoken at length about, to the point of trying to think of solutions and initiatives for what we can possibly do.”
The messaging of ‘The Fatal Flaw’ is a continuation of the nuanced and erudite feminism that brought Paloma to attention through 2024 debut LP ‘Cacophony’ and its enormous, viral breakout hit ‘Labour’. That song, which currently stands at more than 750 million Spotify streams and 11 billion social media views, has, the singer states, become something “far bigger than me”. She describes it as a “homing beacon” for women across the world to share their experiences of gender-based oppression. “The fact that it’s been played at protests, it’s been used by women who have a far graver experience of patriarchy and feminism than I do in my white middle classness, I find that so important,” Paloma says.
Yet though, intrinsic to both ‘Labour’ and now ‘The Fatal Flaw’, are deep feelings of hurt and rage, it’s in the context of love that the singer most readily describes her new record. There is a more straightforward love for art and creativity in the likes of ‘Miyazaki’ (named after the Japanese animator) and closer ‘I Cry In Front of Paintings’, but even in ‘The Fatal Flaw’’s most politicised moments, the message she wants to promote is how equality and the search for love go hand in hand.
“I’ve never actually written about love itself much because I think, as a woman, there’s a fear of it being really trivialised. It’s this vastly important, visceral, massive thing that changes your life, but when you’re a woman, I feel like sometimes people treat it like you’re writing with your little gel pen in your diary about crushes on people,” she says. “I took lots of inspiration from people like Bell Hooks and her book All About Love that I was reading while I wrote this album. She writes so vulnerably about her search for love, but she was also one of the most uncompromising voices when it came to patriarchy. Those two things, it’s not only that they can [co-]exist, it’s absolutely necessary that they [co-]exist.”
Speaking out on injustice and her lived female experience to a world paying increasingly more attention to her has, depressingly but not unsurprisingly, ignited the ire of certain factions of the internet. Even a cursory glance at the comments beneath a video of Paloma speaking on Woman’s Hour about body autonomy and how she “just [doesn’t] care if you find me attractive” is enough to make you want to disconnect your modem forever. “What was really funny about that one is that it made a lot of people really angry, and they were trying to devalue my point but they couldn’t do it without calling me hot,” she laughs. “They were like, ‘It’s easy for you to say with your nice hair, looking really good’. It was like watching lemmings fall off a cliff.”
Photograph by Phoebe Fox
There’s an innate resistance and defiance to ‘The Fatal Flaw’, played out against a palette of primal drums, rousing crescendos and steely, powerful vocals, that echoes the necessity of its subject matter. As the singer states: “What men who talk shit about feminists don’t seem to understand is that I’m not setting out to write about political things. I’ve not just chosen this as a niche interest. It has been the fabric of my life, and you have to write about your life, otherwise you’ll go mad.”
On ‘Pyrrhus’, she imagines watching a son grow up into a predator, questioning the increasingly normalised pipeline that sees young boys failed over and over again, left only with “false promises of masculinity and godhood and heroism”. ‘Good Girl’, meanwhile, was written as a reminder to herself to stay strong and not bend to the public pressure to “alter your appearance dramatically and attempt so violently to shrink yourself to the detriment of your own health.”
“When I started touring several years ago, my OCD was in a really bad place, especially with eating. I was struggling so much with travel and touring and eating and not worrying about being ill, so the image that people had of me when I started was of my body being very underweight and not working very well,” she says. “And now I look slightly different and I’m at a healthy weight, but I’m sure if I lose weight, people will criticise that, and I’m sure if I gain it, people will criticise that. It just has to stop being part of the conversation. So much shame is attached to individual women for crumbling under a culture that demands that they shrink themselves all the time. It’s really tough.”
Where tracks like ‘Good Girl’ are an emoboldened cry to batten down the hatches against the tidal wave of harmful messaging affecting our bodily health, elsewhere ‘Miyazaki’ is a plea not to let AI erode our creative hearts and brains. What do we lose if we let AI continue its infiltration, I ask? “I genuinely do not know what to list first, because we lose everything,” Paloma responds. “We lose media literacy, we lose human connection, we lose intelligence and emotional intelligence. We lose the journey of making artwork and problem-solving, we lose community, and the uniqueness of voices. You have a unique set of experiences and a unique brain chemistry that nobody else on this planet has, and you have the ability to make art that nobody else could. It might be shit, but it’s yours. Nobody else could make that. It’s just wiping yourself off the planet and I do not understand why people would use that as a tool – which, by the way, is also destroying the planet. It’s laughable how unappealing it is.”
Paris Paloma’s argument is hard to disagree with, but actually it’s ‘The Fatal Flaw’ that underlines her points the best. A record with a visceral, beating human heart at its centre, born from a lifetime of struggles, conflicts and hard-fought wins, it shows exactly how effective art can be when it works to bring people together for the better. “It’s that thing of ‘art disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed’, and I think that’s something that a lot of the artists that I look up to and my peers who I really respect do so well,” she says. “There’s this demand for women to be so palatable and I think that’s why the ugly really appeals to me. In itself, it’s an act of resistance for people who would want you to be something that goes down smoothly.”
‘The Fatal Flaw’ is out now. Order the baby blue vinyl.