Who Am I? is the second studio album by English indie pop band Pale Waves. It was released on 12 February 2021 by the independent record label Dirty Hit. The record was produced by Rich Costey and recorded in Los Angeles. While the band's previous album, My Mind Makes Noises (2018), took inspiration from 1980s synth pop, Who Am I? was inspired by female pop and rock musicians from the 1990s and early 2000s, including acts like Avril Lavigne, Liz Phair, Michelle Branch, Alanis Morissette, and Courtney Love.
All of the songs on Who Am I? were co-written by the band's lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist Heather Baron-Gracie; others were co-written by Sam de Jong, Suzanne Lyn Shinn, Jake Sinclair, and band drummer Ciara Doran. Many of the songs on the album revolve around themes of romance, love, acceptance, and queer sexuality, all of which were partially inspired by Baron-Gracie's romantic relationship with singer-songwriter Kelsi Luck. Baron-Gracie was further motivated to focus on LGBTQ+ themes after Doran came out as non-binary.
Who Am I? received mostly positive reviews, according to review aggregators Metacritic and AnyDecentMusic?, with critics commenting on the Pale Waves's change in style. Others discussed the impact of the artists whom Heather Baron-Gracie has cited as the album's influences. Many reviews appreciated the evolution in the band's style, comparing their newer sound to that of pop music from the early 2000s, although some felt that the record was too derivative of its influences. Upon its release, Who Am I? debuted at number three on the UK Albums Chart and at number one on the UK Independent Albums Chart. Who Am I? was supported by five singles ("Change", "She's My Religion", "Easy", "You Don't Own Me", and "Fall to Pieces" all of which were promoted with their own music videos); due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pale Waves was forced to postpone a tour supporting the album to 2022.
Production
Background
In February 2020, three of the members from the band Pale Waves Ciara Doran, Hugo Silvani, and Charlie Wood were involved in a near-fatal road accident when travelling between shows in Sweden and Germany. The bus they were in slid on an icy road and rolled into a ditch, and while no one was seriously injured, the band members have said it was nevertheless traumatic. On top of the road accident, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the planned release of the album, which had originally been slated for early 2020. Despite this setback, the band's frontperson Heather Baron-Gracie explained to NME magazine that quarantine allowed time for band members to have some "space and time to process what happened [with the road accident] and heal from it".
Inspiration and writing
When writing for the album began, the members of Pale Waves struggled to craft songs that sounded different from those on their debut album. Baron-Gracie discussed this issue with Nylon magazine, explaining:
I think the first batch of demos we were trying to be too much like first album. ... I was done with the sort of '80s influenced pop style ... [and Ciara and I] both needed space artistically to create separately. We sort of overworked one another and we were exhausted and we just kept writing the same songs. So it got to the point where we both knew that we needed to take time apart from one another. I went off and I think I only wrote with maybe four people, and 50 percent of the album or more was done with the same guy, [New Zealand songwriter Sam de Jong], because we just hit it off so well. ... That was really freeing for me because I didn't have to sort of consider someone else's artistic vision.
Baron-Gracie later told Coup de Main magazine that when she first met de Jong, "it just instantly clicked" and that the two of them "basically [wrote] the whole album in a month." Baron-Gracie's decision to co-write with de Jong was a break with precedent, given that all of the band's previous songs had been co-written by Baron-Gracie and Doran (on this album, only "Run To" and "Who Am I?" were the product of Baron-Gracie and Doran). Baron-Gracie decided to work on music with other people to prevent creative burnout and engender new ideas: "It was uncomfortable at first because I've never been in a room and made or written music with anyone apart from Ciara before," Baron-Gracie told NME. "But I did it because we're a band and we need to carry on our career." While Baron-Gracie and de Jong worked on songs for this album, Doran worked with other artists to hone their production abilities. Jake Sinclair and Suzy Shinn also co-wrote songs for the album, contributing the tracks "Wish U Were Here" and "Run To", respectively.