Blueprints: How Clairo's Sound Balances Cutting Edge and Classic
Monday, 10 March 2025
Written by Huw Baines
Photo: Lucas Creighton
Clairo’s rise feels like it happened over time and all at once. Having been both a Soundcloud darling and a viral star — both quicksand for some artists — Claire Cottrill’s post-breakthrough work has been nuanced and adventurous. Her third LP ‘Charm’ delved deeper into a world of stately, grown up pop, displaying both melodic nous and a knack for world-building.
Soon, she’ll build upon residencies at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles and New York’s Webster Hall, plus an extensive North American tour, with European dates including two nights apiece at London’s Eventim Apollo, the O2 Academy in Glasgow and Manchester's O2 Apollo. That’s not to mention her support slots at Sabrina Carpenter’s massive BST Hyde Park shows this summer.
In the latest edition of Blueprints, our ongoing series that pulls apart the backstories of interesting writers to see what makes them tick, we try to understand just how Clairo got here.
The internet
Cottrill’s early days were defined — whether she wanted them to be or not — by the enormous viral success of Pretty Girl, which has so many YouTube views that the counter looks like the population stats for a large country. That’ll overshadow most things. The ‘Diary 001’ era is the work of someone who grew up online — it’s got that kind of tossed off, knowing snarkiness about it even in its many moments of genuine candour — but it’s also the work of someone whose canny melodicism bleeds beyond bedroom pop towards something altogether more expansive.
Lo-fi
As an aesthetic, lo-fi generally only takes you so far. Cottrill once observed in an interview with Vice that the cloak of half-mumbled fuzziness her Soundcloud stuff wore was tied up with a desire to hide, essentially indulging her “insecurity”. That idea was later termed by Pitchfork’s Katherine St. Asaph as “the lorem ipsum of the lo-fi artist who’s graduated to hi-fi”, and that’s pretty much on the money. Even so, those songs retain a sense of immediacy because of the staging that, it could be argued, more ornate Clairo releases have deliberately avoided.
Figuring things out
When you start releasing music online in your early teens — in Cottrill’s case a baker’s dozen of singles and EPs under her own name by the time ‘Diary 001’ was a thing — it means that you’re going to spend a lot of time growing up in public. For Cottrill, that involved knocking aside brickbats (industry plant etc etc etc) while developing a discursive style that allows her to navigate changing circumstances and major revelations through the medium of asides and hyper-fixation on minutiae. On ‘Immunity’ the end result is like taking a slug of something potent, with each of Cottrill’s small details adding up to an enveloping whole.
The pandemic
Working on ‘Sling’ during the pandemic allowed Cottrill to write her way through the heavy burden that weighed on her mental health during lockdown. The record’s songs were studied and beautiful in a manner that her first releases couldn’t possibly have hoped to be, but her words still landed like a message from someone who cares if you understand what they’re trying to say. Just For Today, a mellifluous gem of low-key strings and ruminative acoustic guitars, is perhaps the best example of this dynamic, with Cottrill detailing the time a Covid-era panic attack led her to seek help from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The melody skips on, but the lyrics make you double back to make sure you caught her meaning.
‘70s singer-songwriters
It was interesting that ‘Charm’ returned to the same genre as ‘Sling’, suggesting that Cottrill’s work in the realm of ‘70s singer-songwriters such as Karen Carpenter or Todd Rundgren wasn’t simply a dalliance, but something deeper. A change of producer (with Leon Michels subbing in for Jack Antonoff) between the two LPs barely registered as a headline in terms of a change in approach. Instead, Michels bolstered and embellished Cottrill’s evolving understanding of a style that suits her voice and melodic approach. In fact, there are moments here — the way her vocal seems to skip off a piano stab on Sexy to Someone, for example — where she seems truly at ease for the first time in her whole discography.
Clairo Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Thu March 13 2025 - LONDON Eventim Apollo
Fri March 14 2025 - LONDON Eventim Apollo
Sun March 16 2025 - GLASGOW O2 Academy Glasgow
Mon March 17 2025 - GLASGOW O2 Academy Glasgow
Wed March 19 2025 - MANCHESTER O2 Apollo
Thu March 20 2025 - MANCHESTER O2 Apollo
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