Bedroom-Pop Pioneer Clairo Has Found Herself

In a music space increasingly dominated by Gen Z artists and indie songstresses, Claire Cottrill, known professionally as Clairo, has long stood out. It's no surprise that the Massachusetts native has dominated the indie music sphere for years. (She did start posting her music online at the age of 13.)

Clairo first came to prominence through the music she would release on SoundCloud and YouTube in the late 2010s, though she cut her teeth playing house shows in the Boston-area music scene. Songs like the lo-fi "Flamin Hot Cheetos" and the R&B-inspired "Hello?" — self-produced in her childhood bedroom using GarageBand — quickly went viral, garnering millions of views and listens.

"Pretty Girl," a deceptively sweet, tongue-in-cheek critique of gender norms, remains one of her most popular songs despite coming out in 2017. Today, it's amassed over 313 million streams on Spotify alone. The song also got Clairo signed to Fader Label that same year. With the eventual success of her 2019 debut album, Immunity, she was set straight on the path toward Gen Z royalty.

Though her bedroom-pop days appear to be behind her, Clairo's popularity is only rising. She's spent the last few months traveling the country on a largely sold-out, headlining tour that will see her playing at the Fillmore Miami Beach on April 13 with support from Brooklyn-based indie rock band Widowspeak.
The tour comes after the summer 2021 release of her sophomore album, Sling. A departure from the glittering lo-fi beats and synth-pop stylings of all of Clairo's previous work, the album sees the artist at her most vulnerable — her lyrical themes spanning depression, burnout, past relationships, and candid ruminations on intimacy and domesticity.

Where Clairo called 2019's Immunity "a record for the 15-year old me" in an interview with the Evening Standard, Sling is the album for a Clairo that's all grown up — or, perhaps more accurately, pushing herself to. She experiments with fretless bass, 12-string guitars, strings, piano, horns, and Wurlitzer within the span of 12 songs. Her lyrics shed their air of teenage confession and shift instead towards straightforward imagery and direct engagement with the realities of being a woman coming of age in a suffocatingly male-dominated society.

"Why do I tell you how I feel/When you're just looking down the blouse?" she sings in Sling's only single, "Blouse," her voice buoyed by a lightly fingerpicked guitar melody and heavenly harmonies courtesy of Lorde. The song was inspired by her experience in a sexist and predatory music industry that, as she told the Guardian in 2021, is known to "drain young women of everything until they're not youthful any more."

Sling represents an entirely different sound for Clairo, to say the least, and yet it's notable for how perfectly it fits into her repertoire — almost as though it was this work that her previous music had been preparing her for all along. Speaking with V Magazine in 2018, Clairo had said of the term "bedroom pop" being ascribed to her: "[It's] a little weird for me because it's hard for me to accept being put into any box because I feel like I just always want to change." Later in the interview, she added, "I've learned that I don't have a sound. I feel like I'm just ever-changing and I want to keep going that way." Sling is a testament to that music-making mentality.
Indeed, the sophomore effort represents a shift for Clairo, not only in terms of the music itself but also in what it meant for her as an artist. Written amid a pandemic-induced retreat to her family home in Atlanta (where she adopted her dog, Joanie, who has a feature on the album) and recorded in the mountains of northern New York, the album memorializes a moment in the artist's life in which she was finally able to escape the sense of purposelessness that had burdened the years she spent tirelessly touring.

On "Bambi," she sings of her previous approach to her career: "I move so I don't have to think twice/I drift and float through counties with my one-sided climb." Divulging these conflicting feelings — wanting to make music but giving too much to the industry and a gruelingly busy lifestyle, for example — makes the album a sort of rebirth for Clairo.

The Sling Tour, which kicked off in February, has become integral to understanding where Clairo stands as an artist. Each show has proven mesmerizing and calibrated collage of her bedroom pop roots and the more sophisticated jazz-inspired stylings she's taken on since the release of her debut album. Songs like Immunity's megahit "Sofia" and the endlessly fun "Zinnias" are standouts in an already strong setlist.

Given that it's her first time headlining a show in Miami (previously, she's headlined Fort Lauderdale's Revolution Live and opened for both Khalid and Dua Lipa in Miami), Clairo's upcoming show is sure to be memorable as she further hones her South Florida audience and a newfound sense of self.

Clairo. 8 p.m. With Widowspeak. Wednesday, April 13, at the Fillmore Miami Beach, 1700 Washington Ave., Miami Beach; 305-673-7300; fillmoremb.com. Tickets cost $35 to $55 via livenation.com.