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The 50 best albums of 2024: No 4 – Clairo: Charm
The singer-songwriter’s best album yet conjures low-lit jazz bars with swelling, sultry songs of attraction and desire, fleshed out with flurries of brass and vintage Wurlitzers
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. 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. 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.
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