Fabiana Palladino: The Best of What’s Next

The best pop record of 2024 wasn’t made by Charli XCX, or Taylor Swift, or Halsey, or Ariana Grande. No, it was made by a Southwest London singer named Fabiana Palladino, and its DNA pulls from R&B, electronica and disco styles with an affectionate, bittersweet flair. A college friend had Hounds of Love on CD, and hearing it changed her life, as she’d adopt the same kind of meticulous, bold and patient approach Kate Bush had nearly 30 years prior. She’d find the likes of Sheila E and Chaka Khan and write with power and femininity, unraveling personal questions and modifying them into universal answers. Songs like “I Can’t Dream Anymore,” “I Care” and “Shoulda” are understated yet full of clarity; every idea locks into the next, no detail feels rushed or unoriginal and Palladino never overstays her welcome. Her existence in the pop lexicon is a refreshing, necessary one.

She was born into a family of musicians, her father being the great session bassist Pino Palladino—who’s recorded and toured with the likes of Gary Numan, Don Henley, the Who, Jeff Beck and Simon & Garfunkel—and her mother being Marilyn “Maz” Roberts—who sang in the Fabulous Wealthy Tarts duo. Pino and Maz had met when they were both hired to play with ex-Squeeze pianist Jools Holland in the 1980s, and Fabiana would sometimes fly to different cities from England to visit her dad while he was working on other artists’ records.

While her family would play Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway at home, London, she says, was filled with “loads of brilliant music” when she was a teenager. Garage and two-step were both popular electronic sub-genres, but Palladino says she “wasn’t cool enough to know about it” or be into acts like So Solid Crew and Craig David until they crossed over into the mainstream and got labeled as “pop.” But, thanks to a few of her cousins from Cardiff, she was exposed to American R&B from a young age, filling her taste with Mary J. Blige, Timberland and Blackstreet. “I didn’t fully understand the context, but my ear was always drawn to it.”

Palladino’s first instrument was the piano, but she also pounded away on the drum kit, per her mum’s guidance. But she was always a bit stubborn about not wanting to do music professionally. “I think it was that thing of being a kid and being like, ‘I don’t want to do what I’m told!’—not that my parents were telling me to be a musician,” she says. “I wanted to be a dancer. I did the whole training thing, every night after school going to lessons. That was the part of [music] I really loved and, at one point, I thought I’d be a choreographer, because I just love to create rather than be, maybe, a professional dancer.” Palladino went down the dance route through her teenage years before retreating once she discovered that the industry was a particularly difficult and gruelling environment to enter into. “I fell out of love with it. It was around that time that I realized, actually, that music is the thing for me,” she says.

Palladino majored in English at Goldsmiths University, but she admits she couldn’t maintain focus. “I felt like going to uni was just something that everyone was doing and that I should probably do it,” she says. “But I got there and realized, very quickly, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m not sure this is for me.’” She had a vague idea about pursuing journalism but wound up abandoning that, too, shifting her focus towards making music—not necessarily in the same “artist” capacity that her folks were in. It felt daunting for her at first, but there soon came a welcoming entrypoint: MySpace. “I started uploading demos, because MySpace was the thing at the time. It felt really low stakes, because it hadn’t become what it later became, where people were blowing up from it. It was this social network that felt really low-key and quite easy-going. I wasn’t trying to make it, you know? I wasn’t like, ‘I’m an artist now, I’m going to make it.’ It was like, ‘I might share some bits and see if there’s anyone out there who likes this or is interested.’”

Though the change felt overwhelming, she didn’t let go of academia altogether—switching to Goldsmiths’ music course while building her community outside of school, connecting online with future friends who were also based in London and producing similar material, like Sampha and Kwes. “There was a small crowd of people that, now when I look back on it, was really influential,” Palladino says. “I remember hearing [Sampha’s] songs—well, they weren’t even songs, they were instrumental electronic stuff with a bit of vocals on them—and it was just super cool. Those two were really important because, through them, I ended up making friends with some other people and, through that, I fell into playing for other artists and becoming a session musician.” She pauses for a moment. “In a weird way, it literally all came from MySpace.” Eventually, trends would change and Palladino would move all of her demos to SoundCloud.

Palladino has rubbed shoulders with quite a few important folks over the years, like Laura Groves, who put out the very, very great record Radio Red last year, and Jessie Ware, maybe the most important dance-pop songwriter of the last 15 years. She spent a year on the road with Ware touring her third LP, Glasshouse, and her brother Rocco had played with Ware in the pre-Devotion days. She became one of Palladino’s earliest supporters—even though Palladino was “just this random girl she knew.” “She was always really sweet to me, and she checked out my music on SoundCloud,” Palladino recalls. “I remember, she played me on a radio show. She was always like that—one of those people that supports others. I was a fan, Devotion was a really big album for me, and I loved what she created with Dave Okumu. The combination of them two together, I always thought that was fantastic.”

She continues, “I learned so much from [Ware]—seeing how she navigated the industry in that kind of pop world, dealing with major labels and the pressures of being a pop star. She dealt with it with such grace. It was really cool to be around her and also, simultaneously, be encouraged by her—because she was always like, ‘What’s going on with your music? When are you going to put stuff out?’ She would sort of boss me around a bit, in the loveliest, most-helpful way.”

Working with Ware was the last session job Palladino ever had. “Did you find yourself ever having the opportunity to figure out your own voice and your own style when you’re playing with other people?” I ask her. “I think it really depends on who you’re playing for,” she replies. “I think there’s certain people I played with where I was there to support them. You’re there to play their music in the way that it needs to be played for it to be as good as it can be—to support them as an artist, so you can put their vision across. You don’t necessarily get to express yourself as much as you can as an artist.” And that’s why Palladino stopped playing in bands that weren’t her own. “Even though I loved being in that support role—and I felt like I was good at it, it was going really well—it just wasn’t creatively satisfying enough. I have friends who are session musicians and they get to do amazing, creative work that they love and that is satisfying for them. It’s not impossible for that to happen but, for me, it just didn’t. It didn’t feel right.”

About 10 years ago, Jai Paul cold emailed Palladino while she was a box office worker at the Old Vic in London. Like Ware, Paul had listened to her music on SoundCloud. By that point, he had been gaining notoriety around England, especially after a demo of his song “BTSTU” entered the blogosphere and even landed on Zane Lowe’s BBC radio show. Pitchfork even posited that “BTSTU” mirrored the “unmistakable lope of one J Dilla.” He’s only released three official singles in 15 years, and yet few figures in music have been as mystifying or lauded. Paul and Palladino met, and she would become one of the first roster artists on his new record label, the Paul Institute, which he co-founded with his brother, A.K. Paul.

The Paul Institute went live in November 2017, and Palladino’s first single with them, “Mystery,” arrived that month, too. The track marked an “exciting” period of songwriting for her, where she siphoned parts of his atypical production style into her own. “It wasn’t like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna put a beat on it and then we’re gonna do drums and we’re gonna do bass,’” she explains. “It was, ‘How am I gonna create a feeling?’ and ‘What kind of sound world are we in?’ But it was never vocalized. It was instinctive. There doesn’t need to be much explanation between us—it’s what feels right.”

By the time she signed with the Paul Institute, Palladino had worked with a couple of producers and done some writing sessions with other artists, but it never felt creative enough for her. “It was okay, it was fine, but it wasn’t particularly inspiring,” she furthers. “Then, I went and met Jai and we ended up working on writing ‘Mystery’ together. I had this initial idea, which was the hook of the song but it wasn’t fleshed out at all. I played it to him, and it flowed out of him in a really instinctive, natural way. It wasn’t perfect, what we wrote together. It was kind of messy and, musically, it was a bit wrong. But that really didn’t matter, because it was all about ‘How are we going to make that potent, high, emotional feeling into a record?’”

The community Palladino was integrated into at the Paul Institute was second-to-none. She was part of an inaugural roster featuring herself, Ruthven, HIRA and REINEN, and Jai and A.K. encouraged her to do things in her own way and follow her artistitc statement through to the end. “There’s a reason why a lot of that music took a long time to make,” she argues, “and it wasn’t necessarily that we were just sitting around not doing it. It just wasn’t right, and it took a long time to get it right. There was never any sense of, ‘C’mon, we need to hurry up, we need to get more stuff out.’ It was very frustrating but, at the same time, I think what we did put out was really high quality and really exciting.”

The stories around Palladino’s debut album, Fabiana Palladino, have largely centered around the time that it took to get made—a decade, a conclusion likely drawn from the fact that her debut single, “For You,” came out in 2014. But the truth is, for six years after “For You,” Palladino wasn’t working on anything solidly. “To be honest, I didn’t even really decide to make an album until January 2020,” she explains. “Up until that point I was going to do an EP [after releasing ‘Shimmer’ in 2018] and then, for various reasons, it just made more sense to make an album, in terms of practicalities and stuff like that. I feel like it took four years. The 10-year thing, yeah, no, that would be crazy. But there are plenty of artists that I love that have done that.” Palladino wrote “Stay With Me Through the Night” in late 2019. It was radically (and intentionally) different from anything she’d made previously, and it became such a pivotal song that she built the rest of the record around it, concluding with the ironically-titled opening track “Closer” just six months before the LP was finished.

Even in the modern state of the music industry—post quarantine and all—four years is a long time to make a record. Palladino has had run-ins with perfectionism in her past, and it was something that affected the timescale of her debut. “Does producing your own album by yourself ease perfectionism, or does it irritate it?” I ask. “I think it irritates it,” she replies. “In my case, it was a bad combination of perfectionism and then being bad at asking for help, or being a bit too proud to ask someone to work with me. I think, with perfectionism, you do need people around you who you trust enough to work with and for them to go, ‘This is great, just listen to me. You don’t need to put yourself under any more pressure to make this better.’” Palladino admits that making a record like this helped her squash her perfectionism, confessing that it’s “a good thing for [her] as a human.” “I don’t necessarily know if it will be the best for my music. There’s a possibility it won’t be. But, for my happiness, it’s a good thing to put it aside.”

While Fabiana Palladino has been out since April, Palladino’s credibility stretches back ages, as she’s nabbed co-signs from St. Vincent and, most notably, Robyn. Getting that kind of support from the person who has made, in my opinion, the best song of this century so far (“Dancing On My Own”), it feels like there is a gap being bridge between two separate generations of pop music. “I felt very touched by that,” she says, “because those artists, they really don’t have to be doing that. That just comes from a lovely place—a generous place.”

One thing that can be said about the music industry is that its artists’ breakout ages are getting younger—a measurement of access, as virality awaits practically anybody now. Billie Eilish won six Grammys in one night as a teenager, and Olivia Rodrigo spent eight consecutive weeks at #1 on the Hot 100 when she was 18. Palladino, despite being a known name in England for the better part of a decade, is making her formal introduction now as a 36-year-old. Pop music has always had young stars, but the template for who can get famous and how has only expanded in the modern, brain-rotted era we’re in. It’s a young man’s game, so it begs the question of whether or not there’s a sense of ageism lingering there, and whether or not it’s something that impacts somebody of Palladino’s stature.

“I definitely worried about it for years and years,” she says, “and it really did worry me a lot, because I was seeing the artists get younger and younger. The older I got, the more I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m getting further and further from what pop wants. My peers, who I knew early on, were getting signed and putting out records. I was seeing it all happen, and it just never quite happened for me—partly out of choice, but partly not out of choice.”

It wasn’t for lack of trying. Palladino was making music and putting it out, and she had label interest early on that didn’t pan out. “It felt like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’ve failed and now I’m going to be too old,’” she continues. “That was the worry, and it really held me back and it really slowed things down. And I feel like that wasn’t my fault. There really was ageism; you pick up on it from hearing conversations. I was told, when I was in my early 20s, by a record exec I’d met that he would never sign anyone over the age of 25. I was 22 and thinking, ‘So, I have three more years!’ I really took it to heart, because this person was a very respected person in the industry.” Palladino believes that the landscape has changed in the last five years, that the spectrum has widened. “People are a bit more… aware. They care less. These artists that are maybe older, it doesn’t matter. They just care about whether the music is good or not.”

Not everybody titles their debut record after themselves without care. It’s a statement beyond the music itself. Palladino went through various titles for her first full-length, but she always returned to the idea of it being eponymous. “I just wanted it to be this statement of me,” she says, “and it had taken me so long to get to that point. It was a way of emboldening myself, not trying to hide behind anything—just being really upfront and being like, ‘This is me, and I’m an artist.’ And it felt a little bit scary! But I think, in a good way, that was a sign that it was the right thing to do.”

Palladino’s entire family is on the record: Pino plays bass on six songs, while Rocco plays drums on “Shoulda,” her sister Giancarla sings backing vocals on “Can You Look in the Mirror?” and “Stay With Me Through the Night” and Maz performs harmonies on “I Can’t Dream Anymore.” Not having them on the LP would have been “silly and unnatural.” “They’re such a big part of my life,” she notes, “and they’ve been so supportive. But, from a musical standpoint, I love what they do. I love what my dad does, and my mum has, musically, guided me in many ways. Me and my sister toured together a bunch, playing my music. I love to work with people that I know and that I trust and that I care about. I think I will look back on it and be like, ‘Oh, that was really special,’ because that might not happen again.’”

Despite writing Fabiana Palladino after the end of a long relationship, Palladino doesn’t consider it a “break-up album,” though she’s not put-off by anyone drawing that conclusion. “I was actively trying not to make it feel like that,” she says. “I tried to explore it in a really personal, authentic way and try not to be cliché about it—which is hard, because it’s natural to fall into certain songwriting tropes. I had to refine a lot of the songs so they didn’t feel like [I was] wallowing in break-up misery.” The break-up in question wasn’t the end of the world; it was more an absence of comfort and normalcy. She and her ex are still in each other’s lives, on good terms. The heartbreak on songs like “In the Fire” or “Closer” is not a definitive one, but a burning, hyper-familiar extension of yearning. “Give Me a Sign” is full of confusion about closure, while “Forever” posits that a new, simpler life doesn’t ease the act of missing somebody. Palladino wraps herself around 38-minute desire; “I want to be awakened,” she sings, before opening her eyes more than once.

“Do you still feel close to the person that wrote these songs?” I ask Palladino. “No,” she responds, “I feel really different. I feel like that was a very specific time in my life, where I was reconfiguring myself and my relationship to others and to my place in the world. It was a really intense time for me, but in the wider context of everything. It’s a bit of a little time capsule for me, this album. Even when I’m performing it, some of it just takes me back to that feeling which, good or bad, is the way it is. I look back sort of fondly on myself at that time, because it was really difficult, and I’m like, ‘Well done, past me!’ I’m proud of getting through that period.”

Fabiana Palladino has gleaned comparisons to everyone from Hounds of Love-era Kate Bush and Dirty Mind-era Prince, both great influences on her, but an unlikely source of inspiration for Palladino was Todd Rundgren’s all-vocal 1985 album A Cappella, a record that won’t be a first-round draft pick for very many people but its strangeness stuck with her greatly, especially the track “Pretending to Care.” A big chunk of this record sounds like it exists in the same lineage of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’s production for Janet Jackson, especially on an album like Control. Jimmy Jam himself is even a fan of Fabiana’s. “One of the coolest things ever that’s happened to me is that Jimmy Jam likes my music,” she says. “We’ve been in touch and it’s just utterly incredible. Weirdly, that music does sound modern to me and, sometimes, I forget that it’s not. I don’t even hear the nostalgia in it. It feels really current to me. That music is timeless.”

Anyone can write a song that’s full of interesting hooks or melodies, but are you showing enough love and respect to the sonic quality of what you’re creating? Palladino might make retro music, but her songs never feel like exercises in re-writing the past. Maybe it helps that she is not pulling from the art that has slipped out of the mainstream; there’s a reason why rap samples soul and why pop leans on synthesizers—they’re historical elements without expiration dates. Maybe I feel this way because I listen to “When I Think of You” or “Cloudbusting” more often than I don’t, but Fabiana Palladino has the antidote for beating the “vintage” allegations. It subverts the so-often-used signifiers that hinder contemporary artists, and that’s on purpose. “I didn’t want it to feel like some kind of weird, retro exercise at all,” Palladino says. “That was my fear, and that was part of the reason it took a long time, as well—because we really had to refine the production. I think I just had to be really intentional with it and just check myself and rein certain things in, but also not be afraid of it too much.”

She continues, “I sent the album to someone—a trusted friend who’s a really amazing producer—and said, ‘Should I worry?’ And he was like, ‘Stop worrying. There’s only so much you can control.’ And that was nice to hear, because I could just let go of that fear of being a ‘throwback artist.’ I could control certain parts of it, but other parts, no, I couldn’t. It will be what it is and, hopefully, people will connect to it. I am a modern person in the modern world.”

Fabiana Palladino is funky, classical, intimate and nurtured by all the right voices and players—a textural masterclass captured in an era defined by a stream-driven, chart-minded haste. Chaka Khan’s longtime session drummer Steve Ferrone helps set “Stay With Me Through the Night” aglow, turning Palladino’s music into the kind of descendant of What Cha Gonna Do For Me? that it so rightfully hopes to be; “Shoulda” is one of the most anchoring, lavish pop tracks I’ve heard in years; Jai Paul appears on “I Care” and his vocals are romantic and minimal, yet the track bursts with as much color as anything he’s ever leaked or dared to consider “complete.”

Any schlub with a microphone and ProTools can peddle pop music, but to make something that really, truly lasts, you have to not just be elegant, but you must be tapped into the art of grandeur. It doesn’t hurt that Palladino is an excellent performer, the kind of singer who can change the DNA of traditional pop institutions through her dense, studious musicality. Most children of famous people skip the line when it comes to their art, but it’s clear, from her music and her attention to making it, Palladino resists that expedition. Few records offer this much sophistication without alienating the people listening to it. Fabiana Palladino doesn’t crash into view, it absorbs the whole horizon line upon its entry.

See where Fabiana Palladino’s “I Can’t Dream Anymore” landed on our list of the 100 best songs of 2024 here.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.