CLAUD - ME AND THE MUSIC (COBALT BLUE COLOURED) VINYL

Does everything have to feel so heavy all the time? Claud Mintz fights with this question all the time. Not polite little tiffs, either: Big, dragout, existential wars, the kind that might push you to eventually change the tenor of your whole life. The 10 songs on their rich and resplendent third album Me and the Music find the 27-year-old Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter-producer grappling with that question and coming up, triumphantly, with something close to an answer: Things can be heavy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun. Things can be heavy, but that beer in your hand isn’t—why not hold it aloft for a moment, sing along with the friends surrounding you, forget your troubles for the length of a perfect indie-pop song?

Me and the Music is Claud’s first album in three years, since 2023’s acclaimed Supermodels, and although it still fits easily into the established universe of Claud’s music, it also represents an emotional 180-turn from what came before. “I was just sick of taking everything so seriously—Supermodels was such a serious record, and I just sulked in feelings for so long,” says Claud. “Such terrible things have happened in this country the last few years, but I’ve only grown closer to the people around me because of that. The world has shown me that the worst can happen, but it might just bring you closer to your community. There’s a difference between being sincere with life and taking life too seriously.”

Claud’s first two albums, Supermodels and 2021’s Super Monster, were largely inspired by “this one situationship” that, they realised sometime during the writing of Me and the Music, “really wasn’t ever anything.” Coming to that realization changed everything: On Me and the Music’s title track, they sing that “this is the last song I let you ruin,” and they meant it. Once Claud wrote that song—at the famed Electric Lady Studios with singer-songwriters Hank Heaven and Annie DiRusso—they began to feel totally unburdened, writing 90% of the songs that appear on the album in the year afterwards, and changing lyrics of some songs that they had written previously. “It released a lot of regret that I was carrying with me, and it allowed me to be like… this is so fun,” they say. “Making music is so fun.”

Me and the Music’s MO, then, is songs that capture the knottiness of growing up and existing in the world that don’t lose a sense of playfulness or fun. It’s a quintessential slice-of-life record, touching on new romance and inside jokes and Gap commercials and the band America and the place America, and treating all those things with care and consideration. On opener “Gay Witchcraft”—one of the songs that got an overhaul after The Big Epiphany—Claud sings about a new relationship as a feat of both magic and resilience, establishing early on this album’s openness to hard feelings and its fighting spirit. “Around the time I wrote this song, it was when I recognised how deeply important love is in life, especially this particular love,” they say. Its title comes from a book Claud and their friends often joke about, and which suddenly seemed gravely serious in that moment. “I was like, ‘Do I have to crack open Gay Witchcraft to make this work, to make sure this stays in my life? I will go as far as making this joke not a joke.’”