Claud has announced their third studio album, Me and the Music, due October 23 via Dead Oceans, and shared its driving first single ‘She Doesn’t Love Me’.

Stream it HERE.

The Chicago-raised, Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and producer, born Claud Mintz, emerged with the support of Phoebe Bridgers, who signed them to her label imprint in 2020. Two albums followed, most recently 2023’s Supermodels, but Me and the Music finds Claud deliberately loosening the emotional grip.

That change is immediately apparent on ‘She Doesn’t Love Me’. On the surface, it has all the architecture of an unrequited love song: disappointment, rejection and the dawning realisation that the relationship may never give back what has been put into it. Except the unreliable girlfriend in question is America.

Rather than allowing that idea to drag the song down, Claud turns frustration into something communal. Guitars push forward, the chorus reaches for the room and even disappointment comes with an invitation to put your “beers in the air”.

“I love the community I have in America and find so much optimism in people being united in seeking progress,” Claud explains. “This is a love song for that community.”

The accompanying video gives the metaphor a literal life, following Claud through missed dates and unanswered calls before eventually finding the connection they were looking for among friends. Clairo and Josh Mehling, Claud’s bandmates in Shelly, appear in the final bar scene alongside Samia, Annie DiRusso and a collection of friends and collaborators.

That tension between acknowledging that things are difficult and refusing to be consumed by them runs through Me and the Music. It marks a conscious shift from Supermodels, an album Claud now describes as considerably more serious.

“I was just sick of taking everything so seriously,” they say. “There’s a difference between being sincere with life and taking life too seriously.”

Co-produced by Claud and Grammy-winning producer John Congleton, whose credits include Alvvays and St. Vincent, the 10-track record also finds Claud taking greater control behind the desk, encouraged in part by mentor Jack Antonoff.

If ‘She Doesn’t Love Me’ is the album’s centre of gravity, Me and the Music looks set to find Claud doing something deceptively simple with all that heaviness: acknowledging it, turning up the guitars and finding some friends to sing with.

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