Claire Rousay’s Robotic Emo Pop Is Painfully Human

Zoe Donahoe

The world of experimental music can be a hotbed for pretentious elitism, but you wouldn’t know it if Claire Rousay were your only exposure to the medium. Known for her field recording compositions and ambient soundscapes, Rousay is warm, authentic, and disarmingly funny in person. “It [sounds] like I’m just scrolling through Instagram,” she half-jokes about her own music. “I’m hearing little snippets of everything.”

Many of her compatriots are drawn to capturing nature sounds, which don’t really resonate with the Los Angeles-based artist. She prefers to construct her sonic beats out of domestic noises: the dripping water of her aquarium or the incoherent murmurs of “human-affected” spaces like coffee shops. Sentiment, her new album out April 19 and her first for indie label Thrill Jockey, is the closest Rousay has come to making pop music. Though it still incorporates plenty of droning soundscapes, emo guitar riffs and exaggerated auto-tuned vocals take precedence on the LP — a shift inspired by her own teenagehood.

“I grew up listening to [emo],” she tells me between sips of white wine outside a French café in South Pasadena. “It’s been with me forever.” Back then, Rousay tinkered around on the guitar in garage bands but never learned to play properly; she made it a point to learn the instrument for Sentiment. As a longtime guitarist myself, I suggest that I find it rather daring, and almost masochistic, to record a full album without complete confidence in the primary instrument, but Rousay is unfazed. “I really like the idea of a lack of technical proficiency [and] utilizing that lack in a very intentional way,” she says. “It’s almost like an extended technique.” Rather than trying to become a virtuoso overnight, she instead models herself after guitarists with their own unique style, like Christian indie rocker David Bazan of Pedro the Lion. “[His playing] is not really complex; it’s just unique,” she says.

Originally from Texas, Rousay was in myriad bands that never quite stuck. In 2019, she came out as trans and started making her own music, releasing a 2-song EP titled t4t among a few other Bandcamp-only offerings. Even her most abstract tracks offer a certain intimacy, like listening to a butt-dial voicemail from someone on a walk: sounds of shuffling, children playing in the distance, cars zooming by. It’s this genuine quality of her largely instrumental music that has garnered critical acclaim, catapulting the buzzy yet underground musician into the pages of the New York Times and other mainstream outlets. In 2023, she incorporated her voice into the single “Sigh in My Ear,” foreshadowing Sentiment’s more personal direction.

Rousay knows her transness might lead some listeners to wonder about her use of autotune on the new record; even her label, she tells me, inquired if her frequent use of vocal effects was “a gender thing.” But Rousay says that her identity factors into the choice in more nuanced ways. “[It’s] not necessarily commentary on it, but a lot of queer people use vocal effects in music, especially in the last 10 years,” she explains. If anything her use of the effect is meant to accentuate her voice, not hide it. “There is an emotion in using autotune” she says. “Maybe I wouldn’t feel as emotional about, like, Young Thug [if he didn’t use it], but I weirdly connect to the really breathy vocal takes in those songs.” In Rousay’s hands, hints of modern Top 40 pop tropes only add poignancy to a backdrop of homespun indie-rock sounds. Her often devastating lyrics only heighten the effect.

Album opener “4PM,” a spoken-word piece voiced by composer Theodore Cale Schafer, captures the intricacies of depression: the anger, the guilt, and even the humor that can be found amid the dull ache of sadness. Over hushed violin, Schafer reads plainly and unaffected, “I am writing this on my iPhone. And can already tell that this text will either end up sounding like a suicide note or ,like, some pathetic attempt at ‘being real.’” The line is alarming but also humorously self deprecating — a complex testament to Rousay’s unflinching authenticity. The musician speaks candidly about her mental health struggles during our conversation, explaining that her bouts with depression can last months at a time, “It’s so long of this down feeling. And then [I] start feeling guilty about it. And then I’m like, ‘Fuck it. I’m just going to go crazy mode and be self-destructive.’” Those tendencies often lead to unjustified feelings of self-loathing and guilt. “I feel so bad for being so depressed and bringing everybody down around me,” she says.

Though she admits that she falls into “unhealthy coping mechanisms,” her music seems to function as a useful outlet. She writes songs as though they were diary entries, freely admitting her brutally honest lyrics are “direct and not very flowery.” The first single from Sentiment, “Head,” explores the idea of having preemptive make-up sex. Atop sorrowful guitar plucks, she sings, “spending half of my whole life giving you head just in case you need to forgive me one day for something that I did.” Rousay tells me this is her take on the genre of pop songs about using one’s sexuality, usually in an overconfident way, to get what you want; “Head” turns that idea on its head, pun intended, presenting sex as a sort of “insurance,” as she puts it. “Then I’m at least halfway covered for when I eventually fuck something up,” she says jokingly. “I already wake up feeling less than spectacular, and that I’ve already done something to warrant an apology.”

It’s precisely this kind of openness that stings in the best way way; Rousay never seems interested in holding back to save face. But although she waxes personal on and off the record, Rousay does not want her interiority to be cited as some sort of universal trans experience; that is too much pressure, she rightly points out, to put on any artist. “There are trans people who are super alt-right: we share one identity, we don’t share the other one. So I don’t want to be a spokesperson for that,” she says. After centering her queerness in some of her previous music, she almost instantly regretted it. “Why would I ever do this?” she recalls. “Why would I give the straights this information?” Pushing past that fear of being misconstrued, Rousay finally felt like she was able to address her sexuality and identity in a more nuanced way on Sentiment. “It’s implied. It’s part of it, but it’s not the whole thing. It never is,” she says about her trans identity on her album.

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Indeed, Rousay is especially interested in the ways people who aren’t queer still forge connections with her music — a curiosity she shares with her friend and collaborator Meg Duffy of Hand Habits. “It’s so nice having somebody else who thinks about this type of stuff in a certain way, and is also still very out and vocal,” she says. “But then also to have them play on the record. I’m like, ‘this is perfect.’” Sentiment closes with Duffy and Rousay’s collab track “ily2,” with Duffy playing their signature melancholic acoustic guitar over Rousay’s robotically processed vocals: “It doesn’t have to be true,” Rousay sings. “Just say it like you mean it [...] and say ’I love you too’” — a bittersweet epilogue to an album that often feels like eavesdropping on a therapy session.

As we wind down our conversation, moving from the café to her studio space, Rousay admits she might be into Instagram a little too much, complaining of having “text neck” from hours of scrolling and chatting with online friends. Her therapist advised her to take up a hobby outside of music for her mental health, which has resulted in her reading tons of fiction, particularly the work of transgressive queer novelist Dennis Cooper. While describing some of the macabre subject matter of Cooper’s fiction she jests, “It sounds like I’m a crazy person, but it’s such a nice escape from the stresses of playing ambient music,” failing to realize they both explore much of the same thematic territory. It’s a poignant irony that Rousay seeks solace in the bleakness of Cooper’s narratives. Perhaps it’s like peering into a mirror to make sure she’s still alive.

Sentiment is available April 19 from Thrill Jockey.

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Originally Appeared on them.