Clairo: the tricky task of escaping bedroom pop
Artistic evolution is a very fine line to tread when you’ve made your name through such a niche scope. Branching out from the original blueprint can either see you soaring off to new heights or completely crashing and burning. In everything she is trying to create, you can be sure Clairo is more acutely aware of that dilemma than most.
Cast your mind back to 2017, and when a fresh-faced 18-year-old Clairo uploaded her tune ‘Pretty Girl’ to YouTube, no one first expected it to escape far out of the confines of the bedroom its video was filmed in. But what with the makings of the social media age and the new platform it would provide to music, the song became a runaway viral hit, amassing more than 113million views in the process.
This set Clairo on a unique sonic trajectory to stardom rooted in her humble and introspective appeal, lapped up by all those brooding in teenage angst but also perking the ears of the critics, who knew this blend of catchy lyricism and DIY musicality was the perfect tonic to the over-produced pop scene.
That was all well and good for a time, reflected in follow-on mega-hits like ‘Bags’ and ‘Sofia’ from the Atlanta-born singer’s 2019 debut album, Immersions. The undisputed rapture of all these tunes confirmed that the mantra of ‘home is where the heart is’ was the true key to success, yet from a sonic perspective, there’s still a whole big world out there to explore beyond the bedroom door.
How did Clairo move on from bedroom pop?
You only have to look to Clairo’s most recent output to realise that the days of being locked away in her own little indie microcosm to create tunes are but a distant memory. Take the newly-released single ‘Terrapin’, for example – a refined infusion of jazz and lo-fi beat, naturally much slicker than anything a laptop could manage, not to mention the all-out value of the video with ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic as the star.
With only eight years separating these two polar opposite ends of the production spectrum, it’s fair to claim that the singer has moved relatively fast in honing a specific sound, capitalising on it, and then ultimately abandoning it in favour of more expansive sonic pursuits. Maybe it’s ego doing the talking, but there’s also much to be said for Clairo’s original homely label.
By the nature of its very name, the term ‘bedroom pop’ suggests an eventual limit that only a certain muted self-starting approach can appeal to. In this sense, with the huge viral takeoff of the likes of ‘Pretty Girl’ from the very beginning, the categorisation was always bound to become pretty redundant in defining Clairo as she gained more traction and subsequent musical backing.
As such, her departure from the bedroom into new terrain in the likes of her 2024 album Charm should really come as no great surprise. The truth of the matter is that home-produced sound can only get you so far, and if Clairo was to continue on a trajectory, the shackles of bedroom pop ultimately had to be left behind. It may have been the start of a journey, but the singer’s humility was just one chapter, not the whole story.
