{"id":673587,"date":"2026-09-05T08:08:32","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T08:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/673587\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T08:08:32","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T08:08:32","slug":"paris-paloma-on-fighting-the-manosphere-and-ai-with-new-album-the-fatal-flaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/673587\/","title":{"rendered":"Paris Paloma on fighting the manosphere and AI with new album \u2018The Fatal Flaw\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

As far as wise elders blessing the spirit of your record go, they don\u2019t come much more inspirational than legendary stage and screen actor Emma Thompson. Thompson can be found intoning the opening lines on \u2018Good Boy\u2019, Paris Paloma<\/a>\u2019s 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: \u201cI knew one day I\u2019d have to watch powerful men burn the world down \/ I just didn\u2019t expect them to be such losers\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt pisses me off how \u2018Good Boy\u2019 just gets more relevant. I wrote it about how those men call themselves free thinkers, and yet I\u2019ve never seen anybody more submissive than a fanboy of Andrew Tate,\u201d 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. \u201cThere were 200 men outside the prison that Andrew Tate is currently in, all doing push-ups. It was the most little bitch thing I\u2019ve ever seen in my life. And these are men who would supposedly call themselves alpha males. The mind boggles. I don\u2019t know how anybody can\u2019t see the hilarity and the tragedy in that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ParisPhotograph by Phoebe Fox<\/p>\n

Tragedy, empathy, pain, fury and \u2013 yes \u2013 an occasional knowing wink are the ingredients that form the fiery backbone of the 26-year-old singer\u2019s second record, \u2018The Fatal Flaw\u2019. 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. \u201cWhen it comes to art, it\u2019s all you can do to bring in people who align strongly and who just want to be a part of that message,\u201d she says of Thompson\u2019s involvement. \u201cShe\u2019s equally incredibly worried about the state of the manosphere and it\u2019s something that we\u2019ve spoken at length about, to the point of trying to think of solutions and initiatives for what we can possibly do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The messaging of \u2018The Fatal Flaw\u2019 is a continuation of the nuanced and erudite feminism that brought Paloma to attention through 2024 debut LP \u2018Cacophony\u2019 and its enormous, viral breakout hit \u2018Labour\u2019. That song, which currently stands at more than 750 million Spotify streams and 11 billion social media views, has, the singer states, become something \u201cfar bigger than me\u201d. She describes it as a \u201choming beacon\u201d for women across the world to share their experiences of gender-based oppression. \u201cThe fact that it\u2019s been played at protests, it\u2019s 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,\u201d Paloma says.<\/p>\n

Yet though, intrinsic to both \u2018Labour\u2019 and now \u2018The Fatal Flaw\u2019, are deep feelings of hurt and rage, it\u2019s 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 \u2018Miyazaki\u2019 (named after the Japanese animator) and closer \u2018I Cry In Front of Paintings\u2019, but even in \u2018The Fatal Flaw\u2019\u2019s most politicised moments, the message she wants to promote is how equality and the search for love go hand in hand.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never actually written about love itself much because I think, as a woman, there\u2019s a fear of it being really trivialised. It\u2019s this vastly important, visceral, massive thing that changes your life, but when you\u2019re a woman, I feel like sometimes people treat it like you\u2019re writing with your little gel pen in your diary about crushes on people,\u201d she says. \u201cI took lots of inspiration from people like Bell Hooks and her book All About Love<\/a> 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\u2019s not only that they can [co-]exist, it\u2019s absolutely necessary that they [co-]exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Hour about body autonomy and how she \u201cjust [doesn\u2019t] care if you find me attractive\u201d is enough to make you want to disconnect your modem forever. \u201cWhat 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\u2019t do it without calling me hot,\u201d she laughs. \u201cThey were like, \u2018It\u2019s easy for you to say with your nice hair, looking really good\u2019. It was like watching lemmings fall off a cliff.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ParisPhotograph by Phoebe Fox<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an innate resistance and defiance to \u2018The Fatal Flaw\u2019, 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: \u201cWhat men who talk shit about feminists don\u2019t seem to understand is that I\u2019m not setting out to write about political things. I\u2019ve 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\u2019ll go mad.\u201d<\/p>\n

On \u2018Pyrrhus\u2019, 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 \u201cfalse promises of masculinity and godhood and heroism\u201d. \u2018Good Girl\u2019, meanwhile, was written as a reminder to herself to stay strong and not bend to the public pressure to \u201calter your appearance dramatically and attempt so violently to shrink yourself to the detriment of your own health.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd now I look slightly different and I\u2019m at a healthy weight, but I\u2019m sure if I lose weight, people will criticise that, and I\u2019m 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\u2019s really tough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where tracks like \u2018Good Girl\u2019 are an emoboldened cry to batten down the hatches against the tidal wave of harmful messaging affecting our bodily health, elsewhere \u2018Miyazaki\u2019 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? \u201cI genuinely do not know what to list first, because we lose everything,\u201d Paloma responds. \u201cWe 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\u2019s yours. Nobody else could make that. It\u2019s just wiping yourself off the planet and I do not understand why people would use that as a tool \u2013 which, by the way, is also destroying the planet. It\u2019s laughable how unappealing it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paris Paloma\u2019s argument is hard to disagree with, but actually it\u2019s \u2018The Fatal Flaw\u2019 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. \u201cIt\u2019s that thing of \u2018art disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed\u2019, and I think that\u2019s something that a lot of the artists that I look up to and my peers who I really respect do so well,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s this demand for women to be so palatable and I think that\u2019s why the ugly really appeals to me. In itself, it\u2019s an act of resistance for people who would want you to be something that goes down smoothly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018The Fatal Flaw\u2019 is out now. Order the baby blue vinyl<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As far as wise elders blessing the spirit of your record go, they don\u2019t come much more inspirational…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":673588,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[264],"tags":[18,117,19,17,337,284719],"class_list":["post-673587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music","tag-paris-paloma"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117217415967401464","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/673588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}