CHARMED

Clairo makes music about the wallop and jolt of romantic connection.

-  AMANDA PETRUSICH

In 2017, when the singer and songwriter Claire Cottrill was nineteen, she uploaded a song called "Pretty Girl" to YouTube, under the nom de plume Clairo. Cottrill had recorded the clip from atop her bed, in front of a taped-up map of France, a poster for the indie-rock band the Shins, and a sagging stretch of Christmas lights—a classic American teen-age tableau. She periodically held up a plastic Funko-Pop toy in the shape of Gizmo, the furry protagonist of "Gremlins," or fussed with a pair of pink cat's-eye sunglasses. Everything about the clip felt unpretentious, easy,and magnetic. "Pretty Girl is about resisting the urge to dissemble and reinvent oneself in service of love: "And I could be a pretty girl/ Shut up when you want me to," Cottrill sang, making a face that suggested she could not, in fact, ever let herself be quite so subsumed by romance. Cottrill's voice is limber and sweet, and, unlike much of her bedroom-pop cohort, it has some swing, evoking Diana Ross as much as Joni Mitchell. Her vocals were accompanied by a simple beat and a wonkysounding synthesizer line. It was not yet completely rare to find something pure on the Internet, but "Pretty Girl still felt like an extraordinary début.