“I can feel there’s something in the between,” Claire Cottrill sings on ‘Glory of the Snow’, the penultimate track of her third album Charm. The song itself is a rather inconspicuous moment on a record that begins with two memorable singles before loosening up a bit, nestling into a kind of freewheeling whimsy. It doesn’t have the most distinct melody or lyrical ideas, but Cottrill has a gift for making the things that might slip through your fingers feel vivid, inescapable, and uniquely hers. “I pull on the string that binds me/ To memories of the way I loved you,” she goes on, as if describing the very act of songwriting; in her hands, restless and tender, gorgeous yet unshowy, hushed but never quite distant. It’s how we’ve come to know Clairo, and with each release, she’s getting better at refining these qualities and bringing them to the surface.
Though Clairo has worked with a different producer on each of her albums, it’s not in an effort to latch onto a new aesthetic. She seems to enlist producers who can tune into both the sensitivity and specificity of her songwriting and help carve the space it requires; 2022’s pastoral Sling was a departure from her Rostam-produced debut Immunity, but it was more remarkable for the way Jack Antonoff’s production blended into its rich tapesty of sound, subtler and wispier than you’d ever expect from such a pairing. At times, you could hear where the album was recorded – a mountaintop studio in upstate New York – more than the personell behind it, which is also true of Charm. Musically, Clairo still looks to her ‘70s heroes for inspiration, adorning her songs with horns, woodwinds and vintage synths, but her approach has slightly shifted: produced by Leon Michels (The Dap-Kings, El Michels Affair), the new record is more funky than folky, more immediate than meticulous, more feather-light than ornate. While Cottrill and Antonoff did run Sling through tape, some of the songs Charm were recorded directly to tape, which lends a crackling warmth to the album as soon as it opens with ‘Nomad’.
More than a breath of a fresh air, as with Sling, those shifts make the growth in Clairo’s songwriting all the more palpable. Charm is, broadly speaking, a record about the push-and-pull between being charming and being charmed, but it’s also specifically about embracing this feeling that is universally recognized yet experienced, as a result of growing up and rising to fame at the same time, as something novel and newly necessary. “When you have a lot of people paying attention to you, you can feel like your body or your own sexuality is controlled by the,” Cottrill said in a recent interview. “It was overwhelming for me to the point where I swore it off. I didn’t think I needed it. But then eventually, I realised, ‘Actually, I need this – everyone needs this.’” Charm strikingly and playfully pushes the unguarded intimacy that has become Clairo’s trademark into more sensual territory, from the soft, deep yearning of ‘Nomad’, where she’s “touch-starved and shameless,” to the extroverted ‘Sexy to Someone’. It’s cozy but not nearly as coy as her music is assumed to be. “We’re all afraid and shy away/ But now I find I guess I don’t shy,” she sings on ‘Terrapin’, the lively dance between the piano and drums illustrating what a wonderful discovery that is.
This vibrancy, of course, extends to Cottrill’s lyrics, which are evocative in more ways than one. In ‘Second Nature’, closeness appears in the form of “kismet sinking in” and “the sap from a cedar rolling down to be near her.” ‘Juna’, on the other hand, is less effortful but just as deliberate in its phrasing, all butterflies and intuition. She brings up the moon multiple times throughout the record, but less as a poetic symbol than something perceptibly real, a marker of time and memory. She knows its hiding from view might signal the end of what seemed like an intimate connection; looking at it, she remembers the sound of her name in between her lover’s breaths. Those are the in-betweens where an entire fate seems to hang, and she hangs there, too, paying attention to every ticking second and trying to hold onto it.
Clairo’s retreat to the woods has been a big part of her narrative post-Immunity, so there’s both joy and complexity in her making an album about stepping out of her shell, and into a new kind of comfort zone, against that very backdrop. ‘Thank You’ is addressed to the person who “opened the door, cracked me wide open,” but like many of the songs on Charm, it conveys inner conflict rather than narrowing down the emotion, wavering between gratitude and vulnerability. On ‘Echo’, the burden of hiding her love away becomes wearisome, with synths equal parts eerie and enchanting couching to the song in regret. This may be a grown-up record, but it never totally settles; there’s always a lingering sense of unease as she’s left reeling over the nature of a relationship, the little things that tear at its fabric and leave us craving more. “What’s the cost of it, of being loved?” she wonders on the delicate closing track, ‘Pier 4’. Clairo may not hold the answer, but her songs offer a kind of romantic currency – a means, if not to pay the price of love, then at least to take stock, and maybe bring us a little closer in the process.
