Girl Review – A Girlish Singsong with Sizzle and Spark

Oddball Atlanta duo Coco & Clair Clair have been making music together for nearly a decade, but their real breakthrough came in 2022 when their 2017 track, Pretty, went viral on TikTok. They are quintessentially modern stars: singer-rappers whose charm is their clever use of juxtaposition. Their references are either painfully niche (“Don’t follow me when you’re looking like Vincent Gallo,” they quip on Pretty) or hilariously mainstream (their latest single is titled Kate Spade). Their lyrics often manifest as callous disses that border on outright nastiness, but they are always delivered in a girlish singsong.

The bit hasn’t grown old yet, but Coco & Clair Clair’s second full-length album, Girl, attempts to break new ground anyway. On the washed-out drum’n’bass ballad Our House, a cover of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young track, Clair Clair’s vocals take on a dreamy, blissed-out quality, making the song feel like a Beach House remix you could have found on the Hype Machine circa 2012.

Everyone But You captures the hi-fi post-grunge era of the 90s and 2000s, with Coco’s rapping taking on an ominous tone as the song builds to a blown-out guitar solo. This music vaguely recalls the “blog era” – the mid-2010s period when sites such as Hipster Runoff obsessively chronicled the ins and outs of an ironic, maximalist indie music industry – and no single song embodies this more than My Girl, a glitched-out dance track reminiscent of early Crystal Castles.

It is heartening to know that, after years of making diffuse, lightweight pop, Coco and Clair Clair can venture into deeper musical territories without losing their spark.