Paris Paloma faces one of the biggest challenges for musicians today: trying to keep her career going after a TikTok viral moment. A network that delivers streams as astronomical as it does loyalty—zero. “The Fatal Flaw” is the British artist’s second album, the first since she achieved a major breakthrough with her track “labour,” which ended up becoming a feminist anthem for many women who feel that daily life asks for much more from them than from men.
The track contained a bridge that questioned the need to be “every day therapist, mother, slave, nymphomaniac and then virgin, nurse, maid, an appendage who attends to a man while he doesn’t lift a finger.” It mattered so much to so many women that a “cacophony” edition was released with the addition of female voices in the backing vocals, reinforcing the sense of collectivity. Two years later, “The Fatal Flaw” is an album that is also deeply feminist.
In “Pre-Raphaelite,” one of the five precursor singles, Paris Paloma reflects on how women’s appearances are judged by certain beauty standards. Accordingly, she wrote the track as a celebration of each person’s unique beauty, drawing inspiration from preraphaelite muses such as Jane Morris and Elizabeth Siddal, who, she believes, would have received enormous hate in their time for their strong features, yet are now considered works of art. The chorus, anguished, proclaims: “I have the sense that, when it darkens, she glows / She dances naked, but my body, I could never show it / She’s in a painting and I’m outside of it.”
In the same vein, she says she wrote “Good Girl” at the moment of hitting the “limit of what I could bear regarding diet culture, anti-aging culture, plastic surgery culture, and above all the policing surrounding women’s bodies.” “If you call me ‘good girl’ one more time, my fist will crash into your skull,” the lyric warns. Soon after, the accompanying track titled “Good Boy” opens with Emma Thompson citing a Guardian article by columnist Rebecca Shaw entitled: “I knew one day I would see powerful men burn the world; what I didn’t expect was that they’d be losers.” The piece touched on Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump, among other things.
This is only the tip of the iceberg for an album that frequently turns to literary, historical, or cinematic figures to express a range of concerns, more or less interconnected. It opens with a track named “Miyazaki” in homage to Studio Ghibli’s co-founder. It is about art itself and connects to Hayao Miyazaki’s criticisms of artificial intelligence: “I’m not a violent person, but I do things with aggression / I’m not a violent person, but my work is an exception,” says another single from the album.
“Rothko” addresses the frustration Paris Paloma feels about not crying in front of the great color blocks by this artist, something others claim to have done. Her own response, “I Cry In Front of Paintings,” contains a reference to Orpheus, as “Pyrrhus” reimagines the tale of the Greek warrior… and so we could continue up to the album’s title, drawn from the opening line of “The Secret,” Donna Tartt’s celebrated debut, a gripping thriller rather than a social tract or grandiose manifesto. The line was, “Does such a fatal flaw exist outside of literature, that dramatic and dark fissure that marks a life?”
If this album bears that “fatal flaw,” it would be in trying to pack too many art forms into a too-small junk drawer. Paris Paloma’s compositions swing from trip hop (“Pre-Raphaelite”) to an acoustic ballad (“get her the fucking flowers”), to synth-pop (“Good Girl”). And that brings two problems: first, you can’t pursue the loftiest lyrical ambitions while musically presenting yourself merely as the next Gracie Abrams, or at best the next Florence + the Machine (as in songs like “Stem the Flow,” “Pyrrhus”). And second, when you aim so high with your message, the bare minimum is to deliver a chorus capable of transcending social networks, demographics, and generations; in this album, that anthem to cross over does not fully materialize—no “Zombie,” no “Shake It Out.”
It is when she comes closest to the epic that what Paris Paloma is telling us aligns with how she tells it, and with the dramatic cover art she uses to convey it. “I Cry in Front of Paintings” may be the best track on the whole record, and perhaps it is not ideal that it sits at the end. This album, from the start, seemed intended to be as grandiose as The Lord of the Rings—another of her endless references.
