Clairo Washington Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

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About Clairo

Claire Elizabeth Cottrill was born August 18, 1998, in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Carlisle, Massachusetts, in the northwestern suburbs of Boston. Her father is Geoff Cottrill, a former chief marketing officer at Converse and Music Choice; her mother, Allison Cottrill, works in fashion. The family environment was musical in the working-day sense — instruments in the house, a father with industry contacts, a willingness to encourage demos — and Claire started uploading lo-fi bedroom recordings to Bandcamp and SoundCloud under the name Clairo as early as 2014, when she was in middle school. The pivot song was Pretty Girl, recorded on a Casio keyboard and a webcam in August 2017 while she was a senior in high school, uploaded to YouTube as a single fixed-frame video with no edits and no production, and shared on a few aggregation accounts that picked up the clip the same week. Inside three months the video had crossed ten million views; inside six it was twenty million; by the time Cottrill arrived at Syracuse University for her freshman year in autumn 2017, a video clip recorded for fun had become the project's commercial launch. Label conversations followed almost immediately — she signed with Fader Label, the indie imprint attached to the Fader magazine and its A&R network, on terms that preserved the bedroom-recording workflow that had produced Pretty Girl in the first place. The Diary 001 EP in 2018 collected Flaming Hot Cheetos, Hello?, 4Ever and the early Bandcamp catalogue, and a touring band assembled around her for the first time. Immunity, the debut studio album, arrived in August 2019 — produced by Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend) at his Los Angeles studio, recorded over a stretch of months with Danielle Haim on drums on several tracks, and built on real chamber-pop arrangements rather than the bedroom-pop palette of the EP. The single Bags became the project's defining song on streaming and on critic year-end lists; the album was reviewed warmly across Pitchfork, NME, and the major weeklies, and the touring footprint that followed pushed the project from the 500-cap club tier into the 1,500-to-2,500-cap mid-size theater tier inside a year. Sling, the second album, arrived in July 2021 — produced this time by Jack Antonoff at his Allaire studio in the Catskills with Cottrill co-writing and co-producing every track, pulling the project further toward acoustic singer-songwriter and 1970s soft-rock palettes. The record carried no obvious single, was reviewed as a deliberate retreat from the streaming economy, and pushed the touring tier into 3,000-to-5,000-cap theaters (Radio City Music Hall, the Greek in Berkeley, the Beacon Theatre) on the supporting tour. Charm, the third album, arrived in July 2024 — produced with Leon Michels of El Michels Affair, the New York-based instrumentalist behind the Daptone soul-funk reissue circle, and pulled the project toward a Rhodes-and-analog-synth late-1970s soul-jazz palette with Sexy to Someone as the closest thing to a radio single and Juna as the album-cycle's mid-set breakout. She remains signed to Fader Label in the United States and to Pop Wig and similar indie partners in international territories, remains based in New York City, and continues to operate the project with a long-time core band — keyboardist, guitarist, bassist, drummer, occasional horn player — that has played most of the touring cycles since Immunity.

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