Faith, hope and reinvention

An unflinchingly honest portrait of heartbreak, grief and learning to put yourself first, Paloma Faith’s sixth album, The Glorification of Sadness, is her most personal yet

- WILL RICHARDS

A word that constantly crops up in discussions around Paloma Faith’s upcoming sixth album, The Glorification of Sadness, is reinvention. Recorded in the aftermath of her split from her husband and the father of her two children, the new album is both a musical evolution for the singer and a document of a time that blew her life wide open. “If reinvention means that there’s no energy left to pretend and that it’s just the purest truth, then yes, it’s a reinvention,” the singer agrees matter-of-factly when presented with the idea.

“You do naturally have a bit of a reinvention when you break away from your kids’ other parent,” she says. “It’s such a life-changing experience. We’re still fed so many ideas about what is conventional and how you’re meant to do it, and you have to reinvent when you go against what’s expected.”

The Glorification of Sadness goes against what is expected of Faith in a myriad of ways. After starting out in the late 2000s as a jazz cover singer, she released debut album, Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful?, in 2009 and became a fixture of the UK pop landscape for the ensuing decade.

Though that time made her a household name, the singer says she wants to use her sixth record as a corrective to her artistic integrity. Crediting herself as an executive producer on it is one of the ways in which she does this.