Review: Clairo’s Immunity Is a Starkly Vulnerable and Inviting Debut

The album is steeped in warm acoustics juxtaposed by austere observations about life and love.

Clairo
Photo: Jimmy Bui

The bedroom-pop songs that Clairo, née Claire Cottrill, has released since her 2017 breakout, “Pretty Girl,” have often seemed like they’ve been transmitted from behind a glass wall. Mining the pain of adolescence, her vaguely generalized lyrics can have a distancing effect, and the influence of PC music casts a slick veneer over it all. So, it’s surprising when the 20-year-old opens her debut album, Immunity, by starkly revisiting the night a friend prevented her from committing suicide: “I lay in my room/Wondering why I’ve got this life.” The rest of the album is just as raw and covered in open wounds.

Produced by former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij, Immunity is steeped in warm acoustics, a sharp pivot from the synth palette that Clairo has previously favored. Disparate elements—muted guitar strumming, watery piano, harpsichord—are integrated harmoniously throughout the album. Although they employ a variety of timbres, the songs’ meticulous arrangements shy away from polyphony, permitting only one instrument to take the lead at the time. The effect is impressionistic, paradoxically austere and lush. Up close, each texture is isolated and distinctly separate from the next, but take a couple steps back and everything coalesces into a seamless, highly chromatic composition.

At the center of it all, though, is Cottrill herself. Her characteristically impassive vocal strikes a poignant contrast with her lyrics. She may be keeping her head cool, but her heart is ablaze. On “White Flag,” her voice icily glides over curlicues of reedy guitar and synth as she laments, “I was 15 when I first felt loneliness.” Dense synths often drowned out the vocals on her earlier work, but Batmanglij foregrounds Cottrill’s voice here, amplifying it through doubling or distorting it with Auto-Tune. Her vocal style eschews genre¬-fication, hinting at R&B on “Sinking,” where her voice takes on a honeyed tone and tackles gentle runs, and redolent of trip-hop on “Closer to You,” where vocal effects crystalize her belts over sputtering hi-hats.

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Cottrill’s ability to work outside the mold of indie rock and close-to–the-bone commentary puts her in the same camp as contemporaries Mitski and Snail Mail, but there’s something about her aloofness and measured control that feels profoundly unique. Cottrill, who came out as bisexual last year with a tongue-in-cheek tweet, embraces her sexuality for the first time in a way that’s pensive and unreserved, with songwriting that feels lifted out of the pages of a diary. “Sofia” conjures a sweet vision of young queer love over a chugging, anthemic guitar: “I think we could do it if we tried/Sofia, know that you and I shouldn’t feel like a crime.”

Even more moving is Cottrill’s articulation of the insecure hesitation of budding same-sex relationships. On “Bags,” she navigates the line between friend and lover with a crush who could be straight. Her approach pinpoints ephemeral moments with a wide-eyed recollection: the sensation of fingertips on her back, a mane of hair blowing in the wind of an open car window, a love interest standing in a doorway. You get the feeling that the experiences Cottrill recounts are firsts for her, so vivid and formative are her memories. Throughout the album, a choir of children regularly picks up Cottrill’s vocal melody, emphasizing how naïveté renders every experience that much more transformative.

In spite of its title, the central theme of Immunity is fragility. Time and time again, Cottrill reveals how susceptible she is to unshakable loneliness (“White Flag”), the inevitable growing apart of young lovers (“Impossible”), the physical limitations caused by her rheumatoid arthritis (“I Wouldn’t Ask You”). But it’s evident that Cottrill is done feigning immunity. On “Impossible,” she confesses that seeing the face of an ex still shakes her up years after their falling out, but she’s resolute when she sings, “But I know, know that it’s right/To listen to my breathing and start believing myself.” Life, Cottrill tells us, is full of loose ends, lingering emotions, and unfinished business. When reconciling these liminal states proves difficult, if not impossible, Cottrill turns inward to find a sense of certainty to hold fast to.

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 Label: Fader  Release Date: August 2, 2019  Buy: Amazon

Sophia Ordaz

Sophia Ordaz was the editor in chief of The Echo. Her writing has also appeared in Spectrum Culture.

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