Infinite Things

Paloma Faith purportedly scrapped an entire album before reengineering the tracks on her own during the COVID-19 lockdown. The resulting album, 2020's Infinite Things, is rife with so much heartfelt emotion -- not to mention big, hooky choruses -- that the choice seems to have been a good one. The record follows her ambitious, conceptually driven 2017 album The Architect, which married slick pop production to songs about social upheaval, depression, and motherhood. Infinite Things is very much a companion work, though one that feels less archly designed, and on the best tracks, it's grounded in relatable emotionality that feels born out of everyday struggles. This, even when the melody reaches for the sky, as on the soaring title track. Co-written by Faith with Clarence Coffee, Jr. of the Monsterz & Strangerz and former Chairlift bassist Patrick Wimberly, the song is a buoyant anthem about the transformative connection between mother and child, and it sounds pleasantly like something Cyndi Lauper or Annie Lennox might have recorded in the 1980s. Other classic '80s and '90s sounds pop up throughout the album, as on the opening "Supernatural," with its icy Prince synths, and "Falling Down," with its soulful Truth or Dare-era Madonna vibe. Faith always has a good sense for who to work with, and here we get an especially funky collaboration between her, MNEK, and Starsmith on the electronic-tinged "Monster." That said, it's the spare, piano-driven songs that pack the most wallop, such as the shimmering Ed Harcourt co-write "If This Is Goodbye" and the heartbreaking "If Loving You Was Easy," written with Josef Salvat. The latter song finds Faith ruminating on the mundanity and pain of long-term relationships, singing "Remember the days when no ocean could keep me away/The light shone all night and we still had so much left to say/Now we watch TV so we can fill up the space/That's building between us, it feels like you're slipping away." The song is as grandly delivered as anything on the album, but gains its potency from the simplicity and bittersweet sentiment at its core. You can find this sentiment all throughout Infinite Things, that life is about the people we love. As she sings on the title track, "I see heaven in your eyes."