Albums of the Year 2024 - Number 20

Fabiana Palladino releases her hotly anticipated self-titled debut album. The UK vocalist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer releases Fabiana Palladino via Paul Institute / XL Recordings.

Made in the wake of the end of a long relationship, the album is an intimate record that sees Fabiana Palladino confront complex questions about love, loneliness, and normativity in relationships. The result is a 10-track full-length of shapeshifting sonics that draws inspiration from the big R&B, Soul, Pop, and Disco studio productions of the 80s and 90s and filters them through a modern lens.

Written and self-produced by Palladino, the album features performances from renowned musicians and close friends including Paul Institute co-founder Jai Paul, her father and legendary session bassist Pino Palladino, brother and Yussef Dayes bassist Rocco Palladino, renowned drummer Steve Ferrone, and strings from Rob Moose.

Speaking on the new music and album, Fabiana Palladino says: “A central theme of the album is aloneness. Whether it’s a song where I’m searching for connection with someone else, or trying to embrace the aloneness, it tends to come back to me, who I am when I’m alone, what I feel when I really look inwards. I’d say it’s a pretty introspective record overall. The songs are often about trying to go deeper into yourself, exploring your true feelings and how they then relate to and affect your relationships with others."

“Stay With Me Through The Night” is the first song I wrote for the album. It was at the end of a tricky period where I hadn’t written music for nearly two years, and it came out in a bit of a flood, I barely even remember where or how I wrote it, but I knew it was going to be an important song for me. It ended up being the centrepiece of the album, a song that encapsulates a lot of the feeling and emotion of the rest of the record and musically it brings old together with new, which became a theme across the record…a way of combining my influences with a modern perspective.

Rhythmically the feeling of the song comes from funk and disco, I was thinking about the piano playing of Patrice Rushen and Michael McDonald, Chaka Khan’s ‘What Cha’ Gonna Do For Me’, Bernard Edwards bass playing on Chic’s ‘Good Times’, and The Bee Gees ‘Spirits Having Flown’ but we tried to take the track somewhere else in other aspects of the production to bring out the big feelings in the song. It situates us in the emotional world that I tried to create for the rest of the album.”

Fabiana Palladino first broke out in 2017 as one of Paul Institute’s founding artists after her shadowy R&B-influenced spectral pop reached Jai Paul, who founded the label alongside his brother A.K. Paul. Releasing three singles in four years, she caught the ear of critics - Pitchfork likened “Mystery” to “a scratch track from a big-budget 80s studio that’s been smuggled out on reel-to-reel tape” – but Palladino’s output remained slight.

The intervening years have seen her working as an in-demand session musician for the likes of Jessie Ware, Sampha, SBTRKT and Laura Groves while intensely striving for pop perfection in her own music. Last year, she formed part of Jai Paul’s band for his live debut (which she also supported solo) on his hugely celebrated comeback tour.