A wonderfully layered, and delicately conceived album, Charm has utterly defined my Autumn and Winter, its nuance and sensitivity imbuing Clairo’s ode to love, connection, and things past. The range of inspiration she’s drawn from has truly been impressive, from the MAG record label, to the font and layout of Al Green’s Explore Your Mind cover, and her speeding up of the instrumentals in ‘Juna’. My favourite discoveries have probably been The Feminine Complex, and ‘Seabird’, by The Innovations. Needless to say, I’ve racked up a lot of material to listen to beyond my sixty-six-day Spotify Clairo streak!
Opening with ‘Nomad’, released previously as a single with Sexy to Someone, I was filled with anticipation for Charm, the ache of craving solitude over having something you know you will have to let go of. Touch-starved and shameless feels quite ‘Management’, she really knows how to do vulnerability, the whole album encapsulating the sensing, and outlines of emotion, without filling everything in for you. There’s a real intimacy to each track, Clairo seeking to soak up in a feeling, refusing to prescribe it to you – no wonder it took me a while to embrace Charm wholly.
‘Sexy to Someone’ is one of those tracks I always find myself coming back to, it’s got that dense, fluid sense of summer, or, in winter, looking to be thawed. It’s not the most complex of tracks, presenting the simple, universal notion that we can all grasp, that compulsion for the attention and desire of another. It’s like a more joyful realisation of ‘Nomad’ – she doesn’t have it, but she’s looking for it, heck, even getting out of the house for it.
‘Second Nature’ has slowly become a firm favourite of mine, it presents this inescapability to connection, in a subtle, gentle way, drawing parallels to a cedar’s sap, kismet sinking in. There’s a breakdown in the centre of the song though, a desire to pause, a sobering, hesitancy quietly found before the pace picks up and you’re thrown back in.
The perfect Autumn song to me, ‘Slow Dance’, evokes images of low lighting, the candles burning out, and the leaves browning, the gradual stasis that follows Summer’s enduring heat. The quiet solitude, the knowing that they have people to turn to, the watching, the remembering the girl they used to speak to, that sense of singularity in your desire. What is it that’s keeping one foot out and the other crawling in bed? What is it that is only just about enough for you? Clairo shows, she doubts; she doesn’t tell.
I guess ‘Thank You’ will never be tender to me, it’s close to me in all its anxious, doubtful, lowkey affirming ways, but maybe that’s because Clairo’s quite soft on you with this one. It’s quite refreshing and rare to have ambivalence towards the end of a romantic encounter, seeking your own grace whilst feeling better from it I guess, calling yourself out. ‘Thank You’ is mother, it’s tough love.
‘Terrapin’ presents this languor you feel comfortable indulging with someone you’re close to, that blanket, the submission to idleness, and quiet. To me it has a similar, almost reclusive, aimlessness that Syd Barrett’s ‘Terrapin’ bears, it’s just a gentle, lulling embrace of the simplest things in life, and being understood.
‘Juna’ feels like a continuation of this sense of being so wonderfully known, yet its wondering, hopeful inclination for romance melts you, as would the sense that you just might actually get them too. It’s also lyrically quite playful, amidst twinkling keys, without being too coy.
Okay so ‘Add Up My Love’ might feel like a truck, definitely the break-up track of the album – ‘Thank You’, too, but that feels more ambivalent, entertaining misplaced feelings, and undelivered expectations. I’ve been playing this one quite a lot lately, attitude really shining through this one amidst doubt and the humbling feeling that maybe it was never enough. There’s a real warmth and grace Clairo extends in this goodbye track, but it’s very much shrouded by this retroactive doubt over the whole relationship – a universal experience I think. Adding things up is funny! It’s a simple, final gift, address of a lover, but also, and I’m sure only I feel like this, but a kind of angsty last call to someone, to see you, all the things you gave.
It took me a while to like ‘Echo’, the track I’d always skip, but one day it just clicked. Its appeal has a much more remote quality to other more accessible Charm tracks, its central concern the unrequited love, the ‘something’ that you need from someone, Clairo constantly using ‘our’ rather devastatingly because it’s evident that sense isn’t returned, leaving the track suspended in a rather helpless wake. ‘Echo’ just won’t reward you with any tricks or satiate you properly.
‘Glory of the Snow’ delivers hope once more, maybe ‘First Snow Theory’ is real (it’s not, guys), this track holds a true sense of optimism and easy joy that follows much ache and uncertainty. It’s less about finding or knowing, but more intuitively reaching for string that leads you back to someone.
Yes, then closing, ‘Pier 4’ is just devastating, Clairo meditating on the suffocating emptiness of closeness, because it is sometimes just not enough. It’s a very sombre track, drawing attention to the perils of love, this quest for self-preservation echoing ‘Nomad’.
It actually took me a while to click with Charm, belatedly enough to miss tickets for her 2025 Europe tour, yet it’s one of very few albums I can genuinely say I enjoy the entirety of, and it has definitely seen me through the latter months of 2024.
It’s almost mildly embarrassing, because it’s not often I get obsessed with things, as someone who tends not to like songs instantly, and finds it chronically difficult to get into the rhythm of, say, watching a TV show, and I was definitely behind with Claire, and then hyping up Charm to my friends (who were moderately into her first) and playing her all. The. Time. Having never really ‘got’ her music before this, I can really say, the third time is the Charm, but, who knows, maybe this marks only the beginning of my obsession.