Like a straight-to-Tubi film, lobotomy-pop duo Coco & Clair Clair are low-budget, resourceful, full of comedically high aspirations. They are extremely fun, extremely dumb. Theirs is a performance of bad taste and brainlessness, a reaction and antidote to pseudo-intellectuality. While they grew up listening to John Maus and Bill Callahan in the Atlanta suburbs, the music they’re making now is closer in spirit to the Black Eyed Peas. In Coco & Clair Clair’s world, vapidness is next to godliness.
Since at least 2021, when singer and TikToker Chrissy Chlapecka tagged a clip #bimbocore and helped ignite a trend, the popular It Girl has styled herself as an irreverent ditz, a “thot daughter,” a resident of Barbie’s deathless world. This summer, Charli XCX’s BRAT complicated that dominant mode, finding a certain truth behind the performance and edging toward earnestness with songs like “Girl, so confusing” and “I think about it all the time.” With their third album, Girl, Coco & Clair Clair take their barbed quips and cheeky attitude so far that they find their landing place on the other side of irreverence.
Girl easily could have met a predictable rom-com ending—a simple taming of the shrew wrap-up—but instead it feels genuinely hard-fought, as though they’ve formed a closer relationship to truth without sacrificing their comedic absurdity. “I’m too rare for Raya, stop inviting me, cucks,” raps Clair Clair on “Kate Spade.” On previous albums the pair were unsentimental and impervious to romance, but on Girl they dare to be tender, even obsequious. They say they’ve recovered discarded lyrics they once deemed too personal to share. One likely suspect: “Do you see me like I want you to see me?/Will you think I’m cool if I watch this movie?” Clair Clair raps nervously on “Gorgeous International Really Lucky.”
Girl is also more structurally robust than anything they’ve made before, the production sharper and less self-consciously lo-fi. That’s mostly because they lean unashamedly into pastiche. “Martini” sounds like a cloud rap type beat; “Everyone But You” like Dean Blunt sampling Incubus; “My Girl” like a tribute to Crystal Castles. The broad-strokes approach to musical influences showcases their talent for summoning the ghost of an original, then using bizarrely specific lyricism to tack against its formula. It is so funny to hear, for instance, Coco rap something as plainly ridiculous as “Don’t come yapping with that damn fucking beak” on the Opium-indebted “Bitches Pt. 2.”
Whatever style they play with, Coco & Clair Clair have a clear talent for finding its most naive, exuberant aspects. You can hear that best on the album’s main landmark: a breakbeat cover of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Our House.” It sounds hilarious (and it is), but it’s also strangely touching. Its uncanny emotional resonance recalls a scene in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, when the protagonist skates to a “Wonderwall” needle drop and appears to widen the aspect ratio with his hands. “Our House” is Coco & Clair Clair’s widescreen moment—when something initially mistaken for irony deepens into sincerity, the confusion of emotions and cultural associations giving way to an authentic, unblinkered response to the art. On Girl, Coco & Clair Clair display a more sophisticated musical and emotional palette while retaining the charm of bedroom hobbyists. At last, they have everything a woman could possibly want.
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