Nerina Pallot at The Glee Cardiff

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’, and her UK Tour in 2022.

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.”

Those familiar with Pallot’s work will understand the pressure she felt to follow on from her critically adored 2017 album, Stay Lucky. Described by Pallot as her “death and shagging record”, it was praised for its expansive production juxtaposed with startingly intimate songwriting. “I was so happy with my last record,” the 47-year-old says. “I wrote it in a week and recorded it in about four days… it just came out.” After 2011’s Year of the Wolf, Pallot’s fourth and final album released by a major label, she began revelling in the freedom to “do whatever the f***” she wants. Yet she continues to be her own harshest critic: “Anything I put out has to meet my own quality control.”

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. “It tortured me for years,” she says, of the ensuing struggle to perfect it. “I hated it, then I loved it, then I hated it again… some days I thought it was my favourite thing that I’d ever done, then some days I’d weep with frustration. It was so lonely making this song.” Yet that loneliness is what haunts the song so beautifully. Pallot’s diaphanous voice glides across exquisite arrangements of sweeping synths and flurrying strings, is suspended amid a delicate cluster of piano notes, then soars joyfully, like sunlight darting across the surface of a swift-flowing river. “Every loss and every retrieval,” she sings. “Every old hurt and every upheaval/ They will be your armour now.”

A classically trained pianist, Nerina Pallot was born in London and raised between Jersey and India, where her mother was born. Aged 21, she signed a development deal with EMI, but no one really attempted to develop her. She worked as a waitress, and at banks, and sang in restaurants, eventually signing to Polydor in 2000. But the team around her envisioned her as another Sophie Ellis Bextor or Lily Allen, failing to recognise her unique songwriting style and folk-leaning sound, and she was uncomfortable around fellow artists who would, it appeared, do just about anything to be famous. Shortly after a notorious incident where she was pushed unceremoniously off a sofa by Steps singer Faye Tozer on live TV, Pallot was dropped by her label. Honestly? It was probably the best thing that could have happened to her. “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 f***ing care! What do I have to lose by standing up for myself?” After licking her wounds, she came back blazing with 2005’s Fires, which included her Top 20 hit single, the uproarious protest song, “Everybody’s Gone to War”. Accompanied by an MTV favourite video showing Pallot caught up in a supermarket food fight, the track was inspired by the early stages of the Iraq War in 2003, and remains pertinent today. Over jangly acoustic strums and grungey electric guitar licks, Nerina sings in a throaty, Sheryl Crow-style drawl: “For every man who wants to rule the world/ There’ll be a man who just wants to be free/ What do we learn but what should not be learned/ Too late to find the cure for this disease.” Around the time she released her Gold-certified 2005 album, Fires, Pallot “went through a phase in my thirties where I felt, not like a failure exactly, but like I had todo all these things, make good”. Then two people she knew took their own lives and she realised, “It’s f***ing fine, even if you’re just shambling along. You’re still here.”

She wrote “Born”, a gorgeously understated track 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.” It’s dedicated to one person in particular, whom Pallot says was dealt “a very bad hand at a very formative age”, and whose existence she wanted to celebrate. During lockdown, she found herself reevaluating the way we interact with one another: “Every human we come into contact with directly affects the course of our own lives – whether in the most insignificant or profound way,” she says. The death of a friend “was really sobering. It really shook me up in a way I wasn’t expecting. I really felt like every day was a blessing after that. I feel that now.”

“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-f***ing-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 Nerina 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 f**k-you to my ex-boyfriend,” Nerina 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 Chatterly. “He’ll die of embarrassment reading this but I wrote it for my husband as a thank you,” she says. “And hopefully as a song to usher in some good times.” Family gets another look-in on “Mama”, influenced by her mother’s favourite artist, British icon Elkie Brooks. “I think I wanted to make it sound like the records she used to put on in the car,” Nerina says, smiling. Indeed, 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, Nerina 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.