The Weight of the Unspoken

From "Labour" to "Good Girl": Paris Paloma's Unfinished Conversation

Cristina Massei / Alamy

This piece examines why Paris Paloma has become such a powerful touchstone for women in heteronormative relationships. Her songs expose the hidden architecture of gendered expectation, from domestic labor to beauty as discipline, reframing women’s exhaustion as structural rather than personal.

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Paris Paloma did not set out to become the voice of a generation. She grew up in Derbyshire, taught herself guitar after falling in love with Ed Sheeran's storytelling, and spent lockdown writing songs shaped by mythology, Pre-Raphaelite painting, and the novels of Madeline Miller. She released a debut EP, Cemeteries and Socials, in 2021, quietly building a catalog rooted in soft, folksy sounds and literary allusion. Then, in March 2023, she released "Labour," and everything changed.

"Labour" accumulated over 530 million streams on Spotify and sparked over 11 billion views across social media. It soundtracked TikToks about women leaving relationships, reproductive rights campaigns, and the viral "run like a girl" movement. Within 24 hours of its release, it reached one million streams on Spotify and one million views on YouTube. For a song built around folk guitar and a bridge about domestic servitude, its reach was staggering — and entirely unsurprising to the women who heard themselves in it.

The song's power lies in its precision. Paloma doesn't gesture vaguely at inequality; she catalogs it: "All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid / Nymph, then a virgin, nurse, then a servant / Just an appendage, live to attend him / So that he never lifts a finger / 24/7 baby machine / So he can live out his picket-fence dreams / It's not an act of love if you make her / You make me do too much labour."

Each role in that list is a real expectation, often unspoken, placed on women in heteronormative relationships. Emotional support, physical caretaking, sexual availability, domestic maintenance — not as choices, but as assumptions. The weight of these roles only compounds when a woman is partnered with children. Researchers have a name for the woman carrying all of this: the "married single mother." She is partnered with a cis-gendered man, often legally bound, yet shoulders the overwhelming majority of both physical and emotional labor in the household. She manages the schedules, anticipates the needs, and maintains the peace. Her partner may be present, even loving, without being equally accountable. "Labour" names this dynamic without flinching, and for many women, being named is its own form of relief.

Paloma has cited Madeline Miller's Circe as a partial influence on the song — a fitting source, given that Miller's novel is itself about a woman whose labor, power, and inner life are systematically overlooked by those around her. The mythological undercurrent in Paloma's work is not decorative. It is argumentative: women's invisible labor is not new, not personal, not a private failing. It is ancient, structural, and long overdue for examination.

What Paloma understood intuitively, and what "Labour" demonstrates, is that women do not just perform physical domestic work — they manage the entire emotional architecture of both private and public life. This is what sociologist Arlie Hochschild first termed "emotional labor": the work of monitoring, regulating, and sustaining the feelings of others, work that leaves no visible trace and accrues no visible credit. In heteronormative relationships, it falls disproportionately to women.

Paloma has described her hope that the song could serve as "a protective sphere in which to feel any emotions that need to be felt." What she created, perhaps beyond her own anticipation, was a gathering point. The song became a shared language for experiences that had long been dismissed as overreaction or ingratitude — the particular exhaustion of being everything to everyone while remaining, somehow, invisible.

That language has only grown more expansive since. Her 2024 debut album Cacophony, released through Nettwerk Music Group, incorporates elements of dark pop, folk, and indie, addressing themes of feminine identity, emotional struggle, and societal expectations. Inspired partly by Greek mythology and structured loosely around the hero's journey, it is a 15-track record that extends well beyond "Labour" while keeping its central argument intact. Tracks like "His Land" and "Last Woman on Earth" continue to interrogate the cost of living in a world that has been largely built by and for men.

Her 2025 single "Good Boy," which features Dame Emma Thompson, expanded on the themes of "Labour" while adding a new dimension: the manosphere itself.  The song positions the men drawn to red-pill ideology not as powerful but as captured — loyal to a system that ultimately diminishes them too. Then came "Good Girl," released January 30, 2026, continuing the series as the most recent standalone single from one of contemporary pop's most vital feminist voices. Where "Labour" examined what women are expected to do, and "Good Boy" examined who is asking it of them, "Good Girl" turns to the body — a rallying cry against the beauty standards peddled by a society oriented around the male gaze. Together, the three songs form something close to a triptych: labor, ideology, and the physical self, all sites where women are asked to perform, diminish, or disappear.

What makes Paloma's work resonate so specifically with women in heteronormative relationships is its refusal to treat these experiences as incidental or exceptional. "Labour" does not present the exhausted woman as a victim of one bad partner. It presents her as a participant in a system — one that assigns her roles before she has agreed to them, that calls her compliance love and her resistance ingratitude. As Paloma writes, "Who tends the orchards? Who fixes up the gables?" The question is rhetorical. The answer has always been assumed.

When announcing Cacophony, Paloma described the album as her way of making sense of "the overwhelming space of my mind where my anxiety, my OCD, and trauma processing lives," adding, "I love the feral, feminine aspects of my music." That self-description matters. Paloma is not writing from a position of removed critique. She is writing from inside the experience, with the specificity that only comes from living it. That is why women hear themselves in her work — because she speaks from unfiltered, raw emotion that gives permission for others to follow suit. 

The conversation she has opened is not finished. It is, by her own account, just beginning.