“Pardon my emotions,” Clairo apologized on her 2019 debut Immunity, suppressing a pounding desire to shut off the TV and just kiss already, worried that her friend would be terribly inconvenienced by the news of her crush. The 22-year-old artist’s world was one of discretion and uncertainty, small utterances and their shadow meanings, shy nudges toward people you want so badly to touch. (As she once told Rookie, “Getting close to someone is a really sensitive thing.”) But on “Blouse,” the hushed lead single of Clairo’s second album, Sling, the little thrills of adolescence are gone. “Why do I tell you how I feel/When you’re just looking down the blouse?” she sings, the dewy sincerity she once radiated now hardened into bitterness. Here is another young woman whose trust has been abused by an older man, and who is so hungry to be validated that she’ll risk being sexualized again: “If touch could make them hear, then touch me now.”
It is brutal to realize, when you’re young, that the ogling curiosity with which older people regard you is not the same as respect, and getting attention does not mean having real agency. Since she stumbled into fame in 2017, and not entirely of her own volition, Clairo has been narrowly interpreted through the prism of her generation—keywords: viral, YouTube, bedroom pop, POLLEN, bisexuality—as an avatar for sensitive youths more comfortable online than outside, and who speak frankly about their feelings. On Sling, you sense her exhaustion with this framing: “‘She’s only 22,’” she quotes anonymous commentators on closer “Management,” a song about feeling depleted by her career. And so, shrugging off the pressure to embody the future, she instead turns back the clock, embracing the touchstones of the past. Sling is her ’70s singer-songwriter album, the work of an old soul raised on Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and the Carpenters. “Mitchell told me I should be just fine,” she foreshadowed on the last record; now she’s stepping up to the mantle.
If it took Taylor Swift until her eighth album to retreat to the woods and return with a muted, elegant folk collection, then Clairo is far ahead of the curve. Recorded in the mountains of upstate New York with Jack Antonoff, Sling features vocal harmonies that sound like gleaming sighs, bluesy electric guitar whines, and plenty of minor key piano. Nothing really resembles a “hit”; the only single, the aforementioned “Blouse,” sounds like Elliott Smith's “Say Yes” tucked away in a sleepy winter cabin. In place of the heady ambiguities of young love are themes that Clairo once believed were “too emotional or intense to unravel”: “Motherhood, sexualization, mental health, and a lot of my own mistakes and regrets,” as she wrote in a recent newsletter. You can read the album, like many artists’ second projects, as an attempt to prove seriousness and maturation, to illustrate depth beyond what initially made her famous. For Clairo, Sling was a necessity: “This record has changed everything for me, because I was fully going to quit music,” she told Rolling Stone.