Gabriella Cilmi's 'Pure Love' Is Out Today, Her First Album in 13 Years
The 'Sweet About Me' singer traded pop polish for soul, jazz, and classic rock — recorded live to tape during a harvest moon.
Gabriella Cilmi released Pure Love on Friday. It is her first album in 13 years.
The 10-track record arrives through V2 Records, and it sounds nothing like the polished pop that made her famous. Instead it leans on soul, jazz, and classic rock, recorded with a full band live to tape at Middle Farm in Devon with producer Peter Miles.
“It was recorded live to tape during a harvest moon,” Cilmi said of the sessions. “I like to think of the songs like ripe fruit finally ready to be consumed after lots of watering, tending and patience.”
Cilmi signed to Mushroom Records when she was 13. A few years later, “Sweet About Me” made the teenager a global star, and her debut Lessons To Be Learned reached the UK Top 10. She has not released a full album since 2013. In between she put out an EP in 2019, started a side project called All Kings and Queens with her brother Joseph, and last year toured Australia alongside Delta Goodrem and The Corrs.
For Pure Love, she deliberately kept the writing circle small and female. She brought in songwriters Julia Church and Anna Krantz, and the three wrote some of the record’s sharpest songs together, including “No To A King.” The album’s touchstones are Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen — spirit over perfection, as Cilmi put it.
Some songs look back. “Too Far Gone” catalogs the things people told her when she started standing up for herself as a teenager in the pop world, while “No To A King” confronts the power imbalances she ran into. The album opened with the title track, premiered by Gary Davies on BBC Radio 2 earlier this year, followed by the singles “YRU Hanging Around” and “Pieces.”
The comeback has been building for months. This year she played a BRITS Week show for War Child, performed at The Great Escape, and toured the UK supporting Beverley Knight. An Australian headline tour kicks off October 15, and in November she plays her first full UK headline run since 2014 — Leeds, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, and London’s Bush Hall on November 24.
