Clairo’s Small Sound

Claire Cottrill from Boston makes bedroom pop in the literal sense—just her in a room with voice and careful arrangement, everything minimal enough that there’s nowhere to hide. Pretty Girl was the breakthrough, this quiet song that didn’t try to impress you, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

What worked was the realness of it. Not performing authenticity the way so much online music does, just someone with an idea and a camera. Somehow that reached hundreds of millions of people, which makes sense when you think about it—when everything else feels like a performance, actual honesty becomes rare.

She’s putting out her first full album, Immunity, in August, with Bags as the opening single. The interesting part is what happens at that scale. Whether the smallness that made the early stuff matter survives becoming a real album, becoming a real thing. That’s always the test with someone this young and this genuine—does she stay true to what got people listening, or does something shift.