Charm: Clairo Grows Up Again

Clairo’s Charm, released in July, is the third studio album from Claire Cottrill, a singer-songwriter who arrived in 2017 as a bedroom-pop viral-hit teenager (“Pretty Girl”) and has, across three albums, been quietly building one of the more interesting small-scale songwriting catalogues of the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Charm is, by a clear margin, her best album. It is also the album where she finally fully integrates her specific songwriting voice with the sonic palette her writing has been gesturing toward since 2019.

What the record is

Eleven tracks, thirty-six minutes, produced almost entirely by Leon Michels, a specific New York-based producer and multi-instrumentalist whose work with Lee Fields, El Michels Affair, and others has been the specific 1970s-coded soul-adjacent touchstone of contemporary indie production. Michels brings his full band to the record. The sonic palette is built around live instrumental tracking: tape-saturated drums, Rhodes piano, acoustic guitars, specific flutes and analog synthesizers, careful vocal layering.

The specific sound Michels and Cottrill have built is unmistakably 1970s-AM-radio-coded: Laurel Canyon folk-pop, with specific elements of soft rock and early jazz-folk. Reference points include Joni Mitchell, Judee Sill, Carole King, and, in specific moments, Vashti Bunyan.

Why the sound works for her

Cottrill’s writing has, across her previous records, always been quieter and more specifically detailed than the bedroom-pop lane she was initially sorted into suggested. Her debut album Immunity (2019) was already reaching for a specifically adult singer-songwriter register. Sling (2021) moved further in that direction with Jack Antonoff’s production.

Charm’s Michels-produced sound is the first production that fully matches her writing. Where the Antonoff productions tended toward a specific contemporary indie-pop polish, Michels’ approach is specifically dry, intimate, and physically present. You can hear the room the record was tracked in. You can hear the specific analog warmth of the instruments.

The match serves Cottrill’s writing in multiple ways. Her specific lyrical instinct, which tends toward the quiet observation and the unfinished thought, survives a more recessed production. Her vocal, which is not a powerhouse instrument but rather a specific introspective instrument, sits in the Michels mix with appropriate intimacy.

The central tracks

“Sexy to Someone,” the album’s lead single, is the specific statement of the new mode. The song is built around a specifically-Rhodes-forward groove, a mid-tempo shuffle, and a chorus that is almost whispered. Cottrill writes about the specific unglamorous aspects of wanting to be wanted in your early twenties, and the song treats the subject with a specificity that pop writing about desire rarely manages.

“Juna,” the album’s third track, is the song I return to most. It is a specifically Minnie-Riperton-coded soul-folk song about the pleasure of being in a specific new relationship. The song’s flute-heavy arrangement is the clearest signal of the album’s commitment to its 1970s referents.

“Add Up My Love” is the album’s most emotionally direct song, a fingerpicked acoustic ballad about the specific exhaustion of adding up the small acts of care in a relationship that is not quite working. The song is under three minutes. The writing is as clean as anything Cottrill has done.

Where the album is weakest

One complaint. The album’s sequencing is uneven. The middle stretch (tracks five through seven) is slower and less distinctive than the opening and closing, and the album would be more effective if those middle tracks were either cut or repositioned. This is a minor structural complaint, not a content one: the songs themselves are competent, but the sequencing does not serve them.

What the album signals for the career

Charm is the third of Cottrill’s albums, and each has taken her further from the specific viral-TikTok-bedroom-pop context that her debut emerged from. At this point, the arc is clear: Cottrill is a specifically adult singer-songwriter whose career is going to be a long one if she is allowed to pursue it at her own pace.

The commercial reception of Charm has been modest but not small. The record has charted reasonably. It has received strong critical reception. It has not become a cultural event in the way that Brat has, but it is not trying to. It is trying to be a genuine artistic statement by a specific songwriter working with a specific collaborator, and on those terms it is an unambiguous success.

Where it sits

Charm will, I suspect, be one of the records from 2024 that aged best. It is not making a large gesture. It is making a small and specific one, and small and specific records are the ones that tend to hold up on repeat listening across years.

Put the album on in a specific late-afternoon or early-evening window. Let Michels’ production do its work. Pay particular attention to “Juna” and “Add Up My Love.” Clairo is, at this point, a serious songwriter, and this is the record where she most fully demonstrates it.