On the final track of her third album, Clairo finds herself at the pier, “playing out moments when there was a touch.” Just a touch: more intimate than pining from afar, sure, but not a kiss or even so much as an embrace. These kinds of experiences—when the memory of a tiny gesture captures the entirety of your attention—are hallmarks of Claire Cottrill’s best songwriting, like the flushed cheeks of “Bags” or the objectifying glances of “Blouse.” On Charm, she retains her attention to these fleeting touches, but pairs them with a lush, rich production, sinking deeper into a soft rock sound that is at once smoldering and whimsical.
Charm is not a dramatic shift in the manner of Clairo’s second album, 2021’s Sling. After she achieved viral fame as a teen on the strength of her sweetly lo-fi YouTube uploads, Clairo released Immunity, her impressive Rostam Batmanglij-produced debut. Then she took a left turn. She moved to upstate New York, teamed with producer Jack Antonoff, and holed up in the woods to make Sling. Where Immunity showed off Clairo’s kinship with bedroom pop darlings like Frankie Cosmos, Sling worshiped at the altar of Carole King—a pastoral, folky album that seemed entirely uninterested in chasing her past or reaching for new pop hits.
To make Charm, Clairo worked with another new producer, Leon Michels, known for his work in the El Michels Affair and as a member of the Dap-Kings. Together, they dug deeper into the ’70s palette Clairo developed on Sling and crafted arrangements dense with Wurlitzer, mellotron, piano, and organ. “Slow Dance” ends with fluttering flute and clarinet; “Terrapin” is filled with piano flourishes. If Antonoff’s production on Sling sometimes felt cool or atmospheric, Charm emits a palpable warmth. Plus, most of these songs groove. Clairo’s vocals remain, by and large, hushed, but thanks to the golden-hued production, her voice comes across more like a murmur in a crush’s ear than a sheepish mumble on a first date.
The intimate experiences that Clairo examines on Charm have to do, she’s said, with “fleeting moments … where I’ve been charming or have been charmed” and the fantasies such moments can produce. It’s a mood Charm’s sensual confidence and retro propulsion readily conjures: “You make me wanna/Go buy a new dress,” she sings on “Juna,” “You make me wanna/Slip off a new dress.” On “Sexy to Someone,” a cozy song about wanting to be wanted, Clairo’s feather-light voice sways atop playful production you could almost call funky. Even in more downcast moments—when Clairo sings of mourning a love while “all alone upstate,” or describes how she’ll “pull on the string/That binds me to memories of/The way I loved you”—the music never wallows.
Rarely do these songs stray from this sophisticated palette. It suits her well, but it marks Charm as yet another successful but polite soft-rock outing, a format with somewhat diminishing returns. One song towards the album’s end breaks away gently from the rest: “Echo,” a spacey highlight where psychedelic synths and Clairo’s droning delivery bring it closer to Broadcast than Carly Simon. It’s a strange tune about a love that “goes nowhere,” whose musical gestures enhance its lyrical ones. These are the quotidian details and the tiny imperfections that make Clairo’s music uniquely alluring. It’s a new kind of Clairo song, but it has what makes the best Clairo songs so unforgettable.
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