Paloma Faith has never been one for sugarcoating. On her new album The Glorification of Sadness, she dives face-first into the wreckage of a decade-long relationship and emerges with a record that’s both confessional and borderline hilarious. “There’s a song called Eat Shit and Die,” she cheerfully tells me. “It’s my petulant child moment.”
That track might come off like a sledgehammer title, but sonically it’s a Motown bop, complete with doo-wop sass. “It’s meant to be a bit comedic,” she explains. “You’ve done all this mature communicating, you’re in therapy, you’ve journaled the hell out of everything—and then suddenly you’re three years old again slamming doors.”
The record is structured around the stages of grief—only instead of denial and bargaining, we get synths, strings, and spoken-word interludes. It’s raw, yes, but also has Faith’s signature theatricality baked in. “There’s a lot of stuff I’ve learned in therapy in this album,” she says, casually dropping song titles like I Am Enough while throwing shade at the myth of adulting. “Even the most emotionally intelligent person still makes terrible mistakes. We’re all out here screwing it up.”
When I ask about that opening lyric—“Nobody’s perfect / Least of all me”—she says, “It’s a disclaimer. Like, lower your expectations and listen.” That’s Paloma Faith in a nutshell: self-aware enough to make fun of herself, smart enough to recognize the commodification of pain, and bold enough to cash the check anyway.
She talks about the moment that inspired the album’s title—a record label exec, after hearing the devastatingly intimate song Divorce (complete with her children’s voices layered in), asking: “How can we turn this into entertainment?”
“It was like a stake through the heart,” she says. “But I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s the title. That’s exactly what this is.’” She calls it her “public confessional,” adding, “Every artist’s pain is for sale. I’m just packaging mine with string arrangements and glitter.”
Despite—or because of—its brutal honesty, The Glorification of Sadness doesn’t wallow. Cry on the Dance Floor is as disco as its title implies. “We try to laugh in the face of adversity,” she says. “It’s how I get through everything. I’m constantly laughing with tears streaming down my face.”
She’s also writing a book about womanhood and the lie of having it all. “Feminism kind of gave us hope and then abandoned us halfway through with too much to do,” she says. “We were sold this dream of empowerment and freedom, but actually we just got more work.”
Ultimately, Faith’s album isn’t about being sad. It’s about surviving sadness long enough to make art about it—and then charging admission. “There’s no such thing as right or wrong,” she says. “We just make a series of decisions and deal with the consequences. And most of the time it’s terrible either way.”
And somehow, that feels like the most uplifting thing anyone’s said all year.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
