Emotional excavation never sounded so inviting.
If 2021 was the year Payton established her hand-on-heart diaristic MO, then the feeling was extremely mutual. Born out of being stuck in her hometown she so desperately wanted to escape before lockdowns forced her hand, Slack’s diamond is her voice cutting through to the emotional core of what’s at play. Similarly, it often feels like Slack is Payton bowing between wanting to exist in those nostalgic moments and wanting to see what lies beyond. But it’s those days that offer a bit more mulling over where Payton truly shines. Crunching back into gear with “January Summers”, a driving nostalgic twinkle in its eye reminiscing on carefree days. After finding ourselves stranded in certain situations, the physical limitations of our world led to us having to reckon within our most inner selves, and that’s the feeling Molly Payton’s debut mini-album Slack brought to the table.Ī luscious offering that from the get-go is soaked in honesty, fracturing the further in you go until Payton is left reeling on halfway point “How Things Change” backed by a solemn piano. Reflection has been a key aspect of the past couple of years. What results is a more polished record that still sounds personable and intimate. It also helped that Super Monster was more cohesive than Claud’s previous work, possibly due to the wide range of friends and collaborators they enlist to enhance it: friends like Claire Cottrill (Clairo), Nick Hakim, and Joshua Mehling, the other half of Claud’s first music project, Toast. But what has made them stand on their own over has been a frankness in how loving affects them, and in turn, affects all of us. There’s an easy tendency to clump Claud’s soft-sung music in with other predominant bedroom-pop artists of the streaming era, and their earlier material more so fits in that regard: sweet yet lackadaisical, tunes simple enough to hum along to. The opening track, “Overnight,” is a straightforward look at what it’s like to fall quickly in love, Claud singing in daydreaming daze: “I fell in love like a fool overnight / I fell but I can’t keep up with real life.” Yet it’s within this simplicity that their messages shine most clearly though: a marked difference from the wandering metaphors of someone like Phoebe Bridgers, whose label, Saddest Factory Records, Claud is signed to. On Super Monster, their lyrics are deceptively simple. Claud’s debut album found beauty in love’s most tragic moments, opening their heart to our ears as a healing gesture.