‘It’s all I really want,” Clairo sighs on Sexy to Someone, Charm’s lead single. Accompanied by ditzy Mellotron and wide-eyed flute, the song verges on romcom territory, with singer-songwriter Claire Cottrill as the unlucky-in-love lead. But behind the flirtation there’s a painful, driving need to want and be wanted in return. “I need a reason to get out of the house,” she admits, before softening the blow of rejection with the metaphor of a casting call: “Ask if I’m in a movie, no, I didn’t get the part.”
Charm dwells in this world of attraction and desire. Giddy songs such as Second Nature, with its heartbeat pulse of piano and Cottrill’s nervous laughter, exist in the magnetic forcefield between two people inexplicably drawn together. But with Clairo’s typical incisiveness, her third – and best by far – album is also about what happens when the spell wears off, and when closeness becomes cloying. “Do you miss my hands hanging on the back of your neck?” she asks on the deceptively breezy Add Up My Love, before shrugging it off, playing it cool: “It’s just something I’m into.”
Such tactile songwriting demands full-bodied musicality. Charm’s lush 60s and 70s-inspired instrumentation draws on the casual strangeness of musicians such as the Beach Boys, Blossom Dearie and Harry Nilsson; Terrapin conjures a low-lit jazz bar, its sparkling piano pushing Cottrill towards a tentative new confidence. “I guess that I don’t cry / I guess that I don’t shy,” she muses, her voice velvety.
Co-produced with soul revivalist and bandleader Leon Michels, Charm’s world is fleshed out by vintage Wurlitzers, flurries of brass and breathy woodwind recorded straight to tape. Embracing the idiosyncrasies of a first take, Clairo and Michels know that to be charming requires a kind of effortlessness, and it brings out the intimacy in her writing – the quality that has compelled listeners since she uploaded lo-fi bedroom-pop tracks to SoundCloud as early as 2013. But after the overwhelming success of her debut album Immunity (2019), a desire for privacy made her consider quitting music altogether. This thought process played out on her guarded second album Sling, and its frosty dissection of an industry which fetishises youth and vulnerability.
On the self-released Charm, Clairo steps away from the intimacy of lo-fi production, the kind of intimacy that is forced, rather than given. Alongside bolder musicianship and a dark humour is the sense that Cottrill has drawn new boundaries: “I want the audience to understand that, with me, it’s never going to be fully given,” she told musician Remi Wolf for Interview magazine.
And of course, there’s something tantalising about leaving things unsaid. Intimacy, on Charm, is about the “sugar on the rim” of a lover’s drink or feeling as liquid as “sap from a cedar”. When performing Juna, the album’s swelling, sultry highlight, on The Tonight Show, Cottrill wore headphones and barely lifted her eyes from her shoes: “You make me wanna slip off a new dress,” she confessed, brow furrowed. Set in a retro green conversation pit, with her band cosied around, it seemed as if the whole song were a fantasy, pure imagination – until she ran out of words. Locking eyes with the camera, Cottrill played the mouth trumpet, making a raspberry of her lips in a way that’s sweet and silly and oddly triumphant. Trumpeter Dave Guy picked up the melody and built it to a brassy fanfare of unspoken desire. The camera panned to show a visibly delighted Cottrill, barely able to keep a straight face.
The album closes with the haunting, acoustic Pier 4. “What’s the cost of it, of being loved?” Clairo asks, cynical and walled off, alone in a sea of strangers. But Charm’s cyclicality, its push-and-pull, suggests it’s a price she’ll always pay, no matter how reluctantly.
