The 50 best albums of 2024: No 4 – Clairo: Charm

The singer-songwriter’s best album yet conjures low-lit jazz bars with swelling, sultry songs of attraction and desire, fleshed out with flurries of brass and vintage Wurlitzers

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‘It’s all I really want,” Clairo sighs on Sexy to Someone, Charm’s lead single. Accompanied by ditzy Mellotron and wide-eyed flute, the song verges on romcom territory, with singer-songwriter Claire Cottrill as the unlucky-in-love lead. But behind the flirtation there’s a painful, driving need to want and be wanted in return. “I need a reason to get out of the house,” she admits, before softening the blow of rejection with the metaphor of a casting call: “Ask if I’m in a movie, no, I didn’t get the part.”

Charm dwells in this world of attraction and desire. Giddy songs such as Second Nature, with its heartbeat pulse of piano and Cottrill’s nervous laughter, exist in the magnetic forcefield between two people inexplicably drawn together. But with Clairo’s typical incisiveness, her third – and best by far – album is also about what happens when the spell wears off, and when closeness becomes cloying. “Do you miss my hands hanging on the back of your neck?” she asks on the deceptively breezy Add Up My Love, before shrugging it off, playing it cool: “It’s just something I’m into.”