Claire Cottrill is the meme who became a low-key pop mastermind. The small-town Massachusetts artist went viral in 2017 with her song “Pretty Girl” – a novelty track that had the saccharine sting of artificial sweetener and was accompanied by a quirky/annoying video of Cottrill miming into her bedroom webcam (103 million YouTube views and counting). She could have been another Rebecca Black of “Friday” fame – a young woman thrown to the social media wolves before she was ready for the judgemental onslaught integral to internet celebrity.
But instead of swirling down the digital plughole, Cottrill leveraged her 15 seconds of cyber fame into a proper music career with her excellent debut album, Immunity (2019), which fused teen angst to beautifully crafted songs – a minimalist electronica foreshadowing of indie supergroup Boygenius.
She followed up with the equally accomplished Sling (2021) – an ethereal excursion with Lana Del Rey undertones (no surprise considering it was produced by Del Rey wing-man Jack Antonoff). Sadly, that winning streak has come to an end with the underwhelming and cloying Charm – a foray into mannered, nostalgia-fuelled pop made with Norah Jones producer Leon Michels that lacks her signature bittersweet edge.
Retro with a vengeance, Charm begins with the lush, string-powered “Nomad” – an easy-listening avalanche that lands like a Bandcamp Françoise Hardy, or The Carpenters trying to score a hit on TikTok. While there is nothing synthetic about Clairo’s feelings – “Nomad” is a rumination on self-doubt (“I’m cynical, a mess/I’m touch-starved and shameless”) – the vintage melodies assembled around these raw emotions fails to do them justice.
The same tonal mismatch trips up “Sexy to Someone”, where Clairo expresses the visceral desire to connect with a person at a physical level, only for the music to push back against the message with its polite arrangements and lack of sharp corners. There are occasional glimpses of the darker Clairo of Immunity – on “Slow Dance” and “Terrapin” her drowsy voice has the ominous quality of someone talking aloud through a nightmare – but, more often than not, this dispatch from the tortured folk department misses the mark.
Stream: “Slow Dance”, “Terrapin”