Ancestral rage is in: The emotive world of Paris Paloma
Female rage is ugly. It’s seen as the hysterical cries of bitter women. It’s uncouth, and it’s loud. But in Paris Paloma’s hands, it’s beautiful.
Her song ‘Labour’ became a hit off the back of her ability to channel hundreds of years’ worth of ancestral rage into one devasting alt-folk track. It pulls all the ugliness of gender inequality into such stark focus that it’s become an anthem for exhausted women, with over 35million streams on Spotify alone.
It’s a brutal look at emotional labour, misogyny, and fatigue – but the real gift of Paloma’s sound is the energy she brings to it. Women being sick and tired of being sick and tired is nothing new, but somehow her haunting chants feel new and invigorating rather than defeated – a rallying cry for her listeners to stop accepting weaponised impotence, encouraging them to give their anger a voice.
It’s the reason nearly 40,000 TikTok users have made it the soundtrack to their own stories, creating a gallery of thousands of women who resonated with the lyrics: “All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid / Nymph then a virgin, nurse then a servant / Just an appendage, live to attend him / So that he never lifts a finger.”
In an interview with NME, Paloma said: “It was so powerful to me that people have applied such personal experiences to the track. It’s been this vehicle for women, and people of all sorts of areas, to resonate with the topic.” The song has been used as a platform to shed light on everything from the tragic stories of women history has forgotten, ever-changing beauty standards and the weight of expectations placed on women in relationships.
Paloma sets ‘Labour’ in what feels like a very medieval setting, which is bolstered not only by the pagan-sounding chants and mentions of bedchambers but the visuals to the song. Evoking the same kind of bohemian, folky stylings of Florence Welch and Ethel Cain, Paloma sits across from a knight-like figure to literally serve him food. There are corsets and candles, but not in a romanticised southern gothic sense. We don’t move away from the dinner table for the entire video because a life of domesticity has made her world so small it’s confined to one room.
Paloma was a fine art student before starting songwriting, so the visual choice to have her close out the video gorging on a pomegranate feels very intentional. In the art world, pomegranates often appear alongside scared images of the Virgin and Child – symbolising fertility and marriage, which is echoed in the lyrics: “24-7, baby machine, so he can live out his picket fence dreams.” In Greek mythology, which has also been an inspiration on her track ‘Narcissus’, Persephone ate six pomegranate seeds and was forever tied to Hades, the god who kidnapped her to the Underworld he ruled.
Using ancient tales of women being oppressed to shed light on modern issues is a genius move from Paloma because it points out the obvious – that misogyny and abuse have been suffered for generations, and its proliferation in our culture is archaic and wrong. Her use of newly adopted ‘therapy-speak’ like “weaponised incompetence” and even the songs’ titular nod to “emotional labour” should be incongruous to the ancient setting she creates, but because our cultural attitudes to women are still so backwards, they make perfect sense.
