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.
This story is from the July 22, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the July 22, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
MIRROR IMAGES
‘A Different Man” and The Substance.”
THE FOOTBALL BRO
Pat McAfee brings a casual new style to ESPN.
OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY
Proximity to wealth proves perilous in Rumaan Alam’ novel Entitlement.”
EYES WIDE SHUT
How Monet shared a private world.
WITH THE MOSTEST
The very rich hours of Pamela Harriman.
HUGO HAMILTON AUTOBAHN
On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow.
TRY IT ON
How Law Roach reimagined red-carpet style.
SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY
Bowen Yang's trip to Oz, by way of conversion therapy and S..N.L.”
SNIFF TEST
A maverick perfumer tries to make his mark on a storied fashion house.
LET'S HAVE A LONG TALK ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP JUST BEFORE BED!
Babe, are you nodding off? I know we’re both exhausted after a long day, a dinner party at which you made a three-word comment that left me feeling like you don’t know me at all, and the subsequent ninety-minute fight that culminated in a tentative truce.