PMA (song)
song by All Time Low and Pale Waves
"PMA" (acronym for "Post-Modern Anxiety") is a song by the American rock band All Time Low featuring Heather Baron-Gracie from the British band Pale Waves.
Background
In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the members of All Time Low returned to the mansion in Palm Desert, California, where they had recorded their last studio album, Wake Up, Sunshine (2020). Because the band was unable to tour, they decided to work on new music since, as Alex Gaskarth explained to Rock Sound, it was "one of the only things [they] had much control over". "PMA" was written at this time and lyrically inspired by the "mental and emotional fatigue that we all went through as a society", according to Gaskarth. In the aforementioned Rock Sound interview, Gaskarth explained: "It was really about ... connecting with that shared experience of loneliness and trauma, and somehow being OK with it, because we have to be." Gaskarth later expanded on these sentiments during an interview with Kerrang!:
"PMA" kind of stemmed from lockdown—the song is about loneliness and isolation, and the realisation that this was a shared experience. There was something wholly unique about the fact that we were all collectively lonely as hell for a while there, and "PMA" talks about almost finding hope in the fact that we were all in it together. A very heavy sense of doom and gloom was lingering, but so too was there an overwhelming feeling that we were experiencing this as one. Ultimately, we’re all going through this together, and it’s kind of an opportunity to learn and grow. "PMA" is about that dichotomy, and finding the in between in all this.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “PMA (song)” is song by All Time Low and Pale Waves. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through song, Time and Pale, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “song by All Time Low and Pale Waves” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q108179191. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “PMA (song)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.