Paige Valentine Pens A Tale Of Renegade Lovers On New Single “Retrograde”
March 8, 2024 BY Emma Orland
PRAISE FOR PAIGE VALENTINE
“It’ll leave anyone listening feeling larger than life and that’s a pretty special thing to be able to do.”
Claire Mooney, triple j
“Inimitable blend of music and lyrics to create something truly special.”
Rolling Stone
“Bringing a sense of light at a time where darkness feels so prevalent in day-to-day life.”
Pilerats
“Paige Valentine fleshes out a finely polished pop that’s a heart-racer.”
Sara Glaidous, triple j Unearthed
“Powerful slice of alt-pop gold”
Mystic Sons
“Makes it feel like you’re soaring through the sky and singing your heart out.”
Ratings Game Music
“A perfect blend of Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey”
Indie Boulevard
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Western Australian singer-songwriter Paige Valentine shares the final preview of her debut album with hazy, retro-tinged pop moment “Retrograde”. Her debut album Lucky Blue is due out Friday 12 April via Nettwerk. You can listen to “Retrograde” here.
Drenched in nostalgia and an ode to star-crossed but flawed partners in love and crime, the track came to Valentine in a dream. “At the time there were a few things going on that were pretty key to inspiring the song. The first, was an incident that swept up the small community where I live. It’s a tiny town with a population of about 40 people (including the surrounding farms) there are no police, no shops, there is only a small road house. The story was that there was a guy and girl on the run from police after the guy “saved” the girl from her boyfriend, big punch-ups, the works. Full wild west style. They were on the run, apparently hiding out at farms, stealing fuel and camouflaging their car,” she explains.
“The chorus came to me right before I woke up and was about to make the 8-hour drive to Perth to start recording the last song. In my dream this huge crowd was singing along to the chorus. When I woke up, I was so upset because it wasn’t real, but the melody stuck with me!…To me “Retrograde” is most in the spirit of where the record was born. It’s the last frontier, a place of run-away bandits, living for the moment and embracing the wild and intoxicating spirit of youth. Those moments and legends live on forever.”
LISTEN & SHARE “RETROGRADE” HERE:
HTTPS://PAIGEVALENTINE.FFM.TO/RETROGRADE
Paige Valentine’s love for the natural world is intrinsically linked to her divine sound, and you can hear it in every part of her forthcoming debut album Lucky Blue, produced with Andy Lawson.
Across its 10 tracks, Paige can trace the sonic line between the music she made in the city and the music she made in remote WA, in a town of 40 people, surrounded by unexplored wilderness and perched on the edge of the world.
Featuring singles including uplifting indie-pop anthem “Cloud Dancing”, raw, slow-burner “Don’t Tell Her”, summer-infused “Navigate”, powerful slow-burner “Horoscopes“, and “Retrograde” alongside a re-imagined version of her 2020 breakout single “Pure”, Lucky Blue is a sonic transformation – traversing Paige’s move from stability and comfort, of rebuilding and reshaping her life, of remembering the lightness of living, and of diving into isolation and thriving in the face of adversity. All of it started at a studio with a little blue door that had a horseshoe above it…
LUCKY BLUE TRACKLIST
High
Navigate
Cloud Dancing
Horoscopes
Retrograde
Don’t Tell Her
Hung Up
Hung Up (Endless Summer Reprise)
Maps
Pure (Reimagined)
ABOUT PAIGE VALENTINE
Songwriter Paige Valentine is one special artist.
Thematically, her music arches across age-old artistic fascinations; love, death, growth, a loss of innocence, and the stark face of grief. She writes elegantly, cutting straight to the heart of matters with devastating concision.
With a clever approach to production and an aesthetic akin to Maggie Rogers and Kita Alexander, Paige has mastered the ability to encapsulate a moment, a feeling, a story within a delicate, heavenly arrangement — a work so beautiful, it’s impossible to resist.
Paige’s 2020 singles, “Pure” and “Fool”– the former with more than 1.3 million streams – earned her support from triple j, NME Australia, Rolling Stone Australia, Pilerats, The Revue, Wolf In A Suit, Ear To The Ground, The Partae, and more, and saw her become a five-time WAM Award nominee and Vanda & Young International Song Competition finalist.
On the live stage, Paige Valentine has supported the likes of San Cisco, Fat Freddie’s Drop and Abbe May, and played festivals including Here Comes The Sun, Summer Fest, Cabin Fever. Later this year she will join DMAs, Chet Faker, Boy & Bear, and more at Fremantle’s Out Of The Woods Festival.
Paige’s debut album Lucky Blue is nothing short of a triumph. It is thematically broad, representative of Paige’s massive growth as an artist and a human over the last few years. The record is a patchwork of reckonings and a triumph of personal growth.
