“Labour” by Paris Paloma

"Labour" arrived in March 2023 as the first taste of Cacophony, the debut album that Derbyshire singer-songwriter Paris Paloma put out in August 2024. She built it by fusing two songs she'd been working on separately into one, and the result is a folk ballad with teeth, aimed squarely at the way gender inequality is baked into the structures around us.

The arrangement is spare and unplugged, just guitar and bass under a massed chorus of backing voices, sung by Natalie Duque, Nolyn Ducich and Annabel Lee when Paloma cut it in Los Angeles with producer Justin Glasco, who also engineered; Ryan Lipman mixed it. The video plays the point out in period costume, Paloma and Henry Hayward in a medieval setting, her carrying dishes to a candlelit feast.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.