Twenty-year-old Clairo broke through in 2017 with Pretty Girl, a lo-fi pop song about trying to look cute for a toxic partner, over a cheap drum machine and keyboard. It was the sort of thing that indie artists churn out year on year, and yet its bedroom-recorded music video got 36m views on YouTube, its relatability and defiantly anti-Instagram aesthetic chiming with a certain kind of emotionally frustrated, self-loathing teenager, which is to say nearly all of them. She’s already toured the world, and is now preparing to open for fellow Gen-Z star Khalid in the US.
Pretty Girl’s bruised naivety was charming but would have grated over numerous similar tracks. Thankfully, Clairo impressively broadens her sound on this strongly written debut album, co-produced by former Vampire Weekender Rostam. Sofia features tinny garage-rock guitars; Impossible has Kacey Musgraves’ aptitude for a clear country melody, and both it and North have the kind of roughneck breakbeats used by Beck, smoothed by Clairo’s cooing voice. Closer to You uses Auto-Tune over an intimate trap track, like Lorde at her most minimal.
Like her peers Maggie Rogers, Rex Orange County and – in ballad form at least – Billie Eilish, there is often an earnestness to her voice that older listeners will either wistfully remember or irritatedly recoil from: all the angst of parsing meaning in two-word texts from your crush, rendered in pained, slightly strained tones on songs like White Flag. There is, as you might expect, sad piano.
But vocally, too, there is variety. Softly may see her fret about a hasty first flush of love, but she seems to relax into a more girlish mode, over another breezy hip-hop breakbeat. She galvanises her voice with steel on the best song, Bags, where the feelings that began on Softly turn sour: “Can you see me using everything to hold back?” she asks, her voice deep and jaded, the pain of not wanting to reveal too much of oneself the first bitterness dripped into a sweet young romance. Is this intense emotional analysis something we actually unlearn as we get older, as exterior life crowds out the interior? Clairo reminds us of what we won and lost on the battlefield of teenage love.
