Taken from the Autumn 19 issue of Wonderland. Order your copy of the issue now…

An endearingly haphazard video Claire Cottrill uploaded on YouTube went viral and suddenly the spotlight was on her. After some scrutiny and self-inspection, her debut album Immunity charts Clairo‘s truth.

A group of nine-year-olds are featured on Clairo’s debut album, Immunity. After a jingly keyboard breakdown, you canhear their giggles sparkle at the end of “Impossible”. On the record’s closing track, “I Wouldn’t Ask You”, they cushion her embracing, manipulated lead vocals as a choir, sweet cheerleaders promising: “you’ll be alright / you’ll be alright”. It’s a nod to both the emotional purity of kids, and advice from the singer’s mother that has stuck with Claire Cottrill for life. Cottrill struggled with her mental health growing up in Carlisle, Massachusetts. Insecurities swarmed — about her looks, about the way she spoke — and, in a lot of ways, she didn’t feel good enough. Her mother, and “absolute best friend”, told her to think about a nine-year-old version of herself, how hurt she would be if she said those things to her. “For my mom to bring that visual into my life was really necessary and important,” the 20-year-old tells me. “It not only changed the way I thought about myself and how I spoke about myself, it changed how I looked at other people.”

She’s on tour with Khalid when we speak over the phone in August, having released Immunity while she orbits North America. She has to ask someone to find out where they’re currently stationed. Her voice is soft, but croaks like I’ve just woken her up, my question reaching into the limbo of a nomadic existence and pulling her into reality. “It’s a crazy time for me, I guess,” she affirms. “It’s like a weight has been lifted, because the world is slowly getting to know the person that I actually am.”

Aside from her mother’s liberating advice, another marked event had to happen for us to hear Immunity. In 2017 a greasy-haired, greasy-skinned Cottrill uploaded a goofy video to YouTube for a song called “Pretty Girl”. The playful drum machine and keyboard track hides deeper meaning in plain sight, detailing the feeling of needing to change for someone else in a relationship. The then-18-year-old Cottrill lip-syncs over magenta subtitles, plugged into headphones while she does caricature-ish hand gestures. Through middle school and high school she’d try out other hobbies but sports and art didn’t spark anything similar to music. Uploading songs to an invisible internet audience gave Cottrill a place to go when her surroundings weren’t as inviting, and “Pretty Girl” was the first to take off. “By the time I had my first week at school as Syracuse University, it was at a million views,” she tells me. To date, it’s reached over 38 million.

Like the rest of Gen Z Cottrill grew up online, and her honesty on the internet was crystalline, baring all in her uploads to pages she assumed would always be private. “For it to go viral, that’s something that was really scary at the beginning because it made me want to corner myself off, it made me want to not be so vulnerable and not be so open,” she says. “I think I was just getting frustrated about people having opinions on it at all, because it wasn’t necessarily supposed to become what it was.”

Her first year in college was spent being chased by industry folk and recognised in class for the “Pretty Girl” video. The internet, which had been a safe space, reared its anonymous head and spat accusations that she was an industry plant, refusing to believe such impact could be organic. All the while, she was trying to tread water. “I knew I wanted to be a musician, but I didn’t know how I wanted to say it yet,” she explains. “I just tried my best to keep making music while in school, and hopefully sustain this virality, because it’s so hard to do.” In May 2018, trying “to figure that out” she released “diary 001” – a six track EP that included collaborations with Rejjie Snow and Danny L Harle. “I think it’s great,” she assures me, “but it definitely wasn’t all I wanted to say. It didn’t even scratch the surface.”

Drawn out by production from Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, Immunity amplifies Cottrill’s message, both metaphorically and literally. “Rostam was the first person to put my voice so forward,” she explains, having hidden it under layers in her own mixes. “For him to put my vocals at the front, and for me to hear that for the first time was a really wild thing.” Now, she says, the vocals can fill any room, and while her voice and lyrics are still intimately personal, you can hear — even feel — sonic waves of emotion in the production itself. She’s finally made songs about her, admitting the older music was an exercise in relating to “experiences that everyone’s had”, but now, slowly Cottrill’s inviting us in.

“I feel like I’m growing in real time and I’m ready to accept that the world is gonna see that change,” she tells me, and after she confirmed she’s “not straight” in an interview with Out magazine earlier this year, her exploration of her sexuality is printed subtly, but indelibly, all over the record. “For me to sing softly about the first time I was ever interested in women, that’s a really significant part of my life,” she says. “Now, I’m able to sing it from my diaphragm. Sing it like I mean it.”

Album track “Sofia” in particular is an ode to the first women she ever fancied. Conceived on tour in Australia, it was inspired by a night off when Cottrill and her guitarist stumbled into a bar. The DJ was queueing up vintage Phoenix, The Strokes, Robyn, Tame Impala and Franz Ferdinand and Cottrill realised she still knew every word to the songs, some she hadn’t thought about in years. “I wanted to make a song that talked about first crushes on women, but without making it feel like a sad experience. Without making it feel like it was pent up forever, which it totally was,” she explains, wanting to replicate that hazy, comforting joy she’d felt in Australia. “I felt that energy when we were in the studio with ‘Sofia’, I felt that celebratory, nostalgic, 2010 alternative music feeling.”

Mixed by Dave Fridmann — producer for the likes of The Flaming Lips, Tame Impala and MGMT — the track leads with guitars like The Strokes’ “Is This It”-lite, and breaks into a scuzzy, meandering bass line. “At first I really didn’t like it,” Cottrill admits, no matter how much it emulated the golden days of her musical education. “But the more that I attached the meaning of ‘Sofia’ to the bass… It felt like this explosion to me, and I definitely can relate that explosion to the first time you vocalise those types of feelings you may have about sexuality, it can just feel like it’s overflowing, and you’ve been wanting to say this for so long, and you’re finally letting yourself talk about it.”

A byproduct of her cathartic honesty means fans reach out to Cottrill for being so relatable, feeling like they know her life as close as their own. I ask her whether while she’s still navigating both her own sound and her identity in front of us, she finds the position of role model intimidating. “I definitely feel like I’ve gone through a lot,” she admits, “but it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be there for them. If someone comes to me wanting advice or needing someone to talk to, I really do want to be that person for them. As someone who grew up finding community online, I have nothing but love and empathy for kids that find community through my music or my friend’s music. Whether it’s through fan accounts or on Twitter or Instagram, that was me.”

The day that Immunity dropped, I trawled the internet for traces of Cottrill’s fans, the way they might have gone looking for her when they first discovered “Pretty Girl”. Her album lyrics had already been uploaded to contributor sites, unpicked by fans and analysed against every anecdote, reference and experience they have of Cottrill in their armoury. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever known,” she replies when I tell her of my findings. In place of her anonymity that was shattered, a community has coalesced around Clairo, and the world, as she says, is slowly getting to know the person she actually is.