Nerina Pallot announces her seventh studio album 'I Don't Know What I'm Doing', showcased by the new single 'Cold Places', out April 8th through Idaho Records / InGrooves

LISTEN TO ‘COLD PLACES’ HERE

NEW ALBUM ‘I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING’, OUT JUNE 17TH

PRE-ORDER HERE

UK TOUR ANNOUNCED FOR OCTOBER 2022

Following up the release of her stunning 2017 LP ‘Stay Lucky’, and her vibrant standalone offering ‘Oh Berlin’ in 2020, the enigmatic Nerina Pallot has now returned to announce the details behind her eagerly-awaited new full-length release ‘I Don’t Know What I’m Doing’, showcased by album opener, lead single ‘Cold Places’.

Some art comes to its creator like a crack of thunder: a strike of inspiration out of the blue. Other projects require nurturing; they need to be coaxed out of their hiding places like shy creatures. In the case of Nerina Pallot’s magnificent seventh album ‘I Don’t Know What I’m Doing’, it turned out to be a case of the latter. This record is the product of more than three years of songwriting and studio sessions, resulting in what is undoubtedly one of her finest works to date. It is filled with memories of childhood, strange tales of fate and coincidence, and beautifully realised reflections of self. It’s about making mistakes, learning from them, and celebrating life for as long as we have breath in our bodies.

Speaking about the new collection, she said, "I’ve been doing this for over twenty years now and this is my seventh album. Supposedly I am an adult, a mother, a wife, a small business owner - and literally most days I feel clueless in a good way. It’s good to be alive, doing the thing I love, feeling like every time I write a song it’s the first time I’ve done it and that I’m still terrified just before I go on stage. Cluelessness is possibly one of the most underrated attributes in a human and I thought I’d make an album to celebrate that.

“I am very lucky I get to work with wonderful musicians and engineers, all of us very experienced, but what we have in common,I think, is both a playfulness and a sense of vocational love of music. A large part of the work was done remotely during the pandemic - and then when we were able to play together again it was magical. Ours was one of the industries most egregiously impacted by the pandemic - and since then, I don’t think any of us have taken playing music in person together for granted ever again. If this is a pandemic album - as so many are currently - let this be one that celebrates loads of musicians being together, doing the thing we love most."

Rest assured that ‘I Don’t Know What I’m Doing’ will delight both old and new fans. It opens on ‘Cold Places’ with a shiver of the harp, notes crawling like tendrils of ice across fallen leaves on a forest floor. Pallot wrote an early incarnation of the song following a wintry walk along the Thames, beginning the recording process at her home studio in London.

Adding about the new offering, "Cold Places was a real Labour of love. And sometimes hate! I started writing it in my head on a long, cold winter’s walk by the Thames and then spent two years trying to get that feeling to come alive in the song production. I wanted it to feel like a dream, like a subconscious lullaby that stays with the listener long after they have heard it. It was always going to need a huge production; a lot of my listening is classical, and so I asked the amazing arranger Sally Herbert (Florence and the Machine, Zero 7) to go to town on something that was both huge and precise, but that also felt like a mini symphony in itself. Once her beautiful arrangement was in, the song fell into place and I knew I had both a finished song and an album."

Nerina also today announces a UK tour taking place in October. Tickets will go on sale next Monday April 11th HERE. Full rundown of dates:

08th - Cambridge - Storeys Field

09th - Norwich - Epic Studios

10th - Brighton - Komedia Studio Bar

12th - Guildford - Boileroom

13th - London - Lafayette

14th - Manchester - Gorilla

16th - Birmingham - Glee Club

17th - Bath - Komedia

19th - Glasgow - St Lukes

20th - Gateshead -Sage 2

21st - York - NCEM

‘I Don’t Know What I’m Doing’ Tracklist:

Cold Places

Alice At The Beach

Master Builder

There's a River

Born

I Don't Know What I'm Doing

The Way We Are

Mama

Only The Old Songs

Australia

Don't Dare (Love Is Hell)

Fun

“I’m really happy to be here,” she says, beaming. “For the first part of my career I was constantly being compared to people who were bigger than me at the time. Now? I don’t care! I don’t fucking care! What do I have to lose by standing up for myself?”

Album track “Born”, is a gorgeously understated song about remembering to value the people in your life. “We all make a mess of living/ We all try to carry on,” she sings. “We try to make the best of it until the day we’re done./ We’ve all got a hurt we’re hiding/ We’ve all got someone we mourn.”

“Born” is followed on I Don’t Know What I’m Doing by the title track, possibly the kind of song Bob Dylan was trying to make when he wrote his ill-fated 1986 album, Knocked Out Loaded. She sings in a weathered but hopeful, lilting cadence: “Just leaving my bed is something these days.” The acoustic guitar meanders sweetly with no clear direction, gathering steam as Pallot’s conviction grows: “In the no-fucking-clue club, you’ll never be wrong.” It’s her reminder to stop judging herself by other people’s successes, or the artists she’s been compared to in the past. “I think because I’m always aiming for something beyond me, there’s always that fate that I’m never quite getting there,” she admits. “But I love the challenge, and I don’t think I’ll ever get bored. I think I’ll be 70 and still trying to write my ‘Hounds of Love’.”

Regardless of the favourable comparisons Pallot earns over the course of her career, she remains brilliantly and defiantly unique. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is her outstanding cover “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division, featured in the BBC’s universally acclaimed adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Pallot’s version opens on a stark piano rendition of that instantly recognisable melody; her voice lands with a kind of fatalistic, angry resignation, the very essence of going up in flames. “When I first started playing that song, it was almost like a fuck-you to my ex-boyfriend,” Pallot says. “It didn’t end well. I don’t think I’ve ever been that sad and angry at the end of any other relationship, and that song was the only one that made me feel OK.” All these years later, she sings it the exact same way: “It’s almost like it’s my own song – I stopped singing it like a cover, because it was articulating everything I felt at the time.”

Contrast this with album closer “Fun”, a playfully theatrical tribute to Pallot’s husband, Jersey-born record producer and songwriter Andy Chatterley. Family gets another look-in on “Mama”, influenced by her mother’s favourite artist, British icon Elkie Brooks. The track is saturated in the classic soul sound of the Sixties and Seventies, with a chorus redolent of Dee Dee Warwick’s “You’re No Good”. Through fraught times, Pallot took refuge in her music and now, listeners can find solace in it, too.

‘I Don’t Know What I’m Doing’ will be available on Digital, CD, vinyl, and cassette upon its release from all good music stores and platforms and available to pre-order from her official web store HERE

DISCOVER NERINA PALLOT

lorraine longApril 8, 2022