No matter your age or station, Supermodels is the sort of record you hear yourself in. Claud’s engrossing, poignant and often pointedly funny second album is a confident diary of the mercury of life and love. Fissures in romances and friendships, pressures of recording careers, the casualties of growing up, the laugh lines of life: Each of these 13 songs is another journal entry, threaded together with scant regard for genre but, like the best pop music, with hooks that linger as powerfully as any memory. Claud approaches it with new depth and the kind of humor that only comes with undeniable new confidence, rendered in structures and hooks that are deceptively sophisticated. Where Super Monster, their winning debut album, was created mostly in their childhood bedroom, Supermodels was born in Claud’s own space, with a team of confidants. Genre became Claud’s playground, an obstacle course full of supposed barriers to climb over & cavort upon. “You caught me looking at photographs of supermodels,” they sing, voice rising slowly over a free and broken piano. “Trying not to cry when I look back at myself.” It’s a staggering moment, a reminder of the ways we’re all working to beat back insecurities. But Claud doesn’t hide anything. Here are all the feelings of these last few years, set first to page and then to songs we can all share. They are kernels of despair, redemption, wit & insight, here to remind us we’re neither the first nor the last to face these blues & keep going.
