Texan experimentalist claire rousay’s foray into melancholic, folk-inflected pop might surprise fans of her tactile collages of everyday sounds like jingling keys, overheard conversation, and suggestive murmur. Those better acquainted with the full extent of her sprawling catalog of self-described “emo ambient”—which spans hyperpop, text-to-speech recordings, and an unfinished Elliott Smith cover—might simply see this as another left turn. In fact, on sentiment, rousay brings together strands from her previous work into a revealing self-portrait, channeling her experimental musical language into the kind of earnest pop she evidently loves but until now has mostly shared as one-offs, swapping her habitually atmospheric ambient pieces for shorter, more melodic, lyrically driven slowcore songs.
Where a softer focus and everything perfect is already here were made up of abstract, shifting collages, sentiment has a stable core in her spare guitar playing and yearning vocals, to which she applies heavy Auto-Tune. Despite sentiment’s more conventional singer-songwriter mode, though, rousay doesn’t entirely abandon her avant-garde leanings, using found sounds and field recordings to enrich the album’s texture, depth, and storytelling. The result opens up a new expressive frontier in her work, finding original, affecting ways of exploring despair and desire.
Depression figures heavily in sentiment’s lyrics. The album begins with a harrowing confession: “It’s 4 p.m. on a Monday and I cannot stop sobbing.” The line, read by Theodore Cale Schafer, comes from rousay’s phone—an analog twist on the text-to-speech experiments on it was always worth it. sentiment’s frank, conversational lyrics build on a similar nexus of dread and black humor. Heavy drinking (“Blacking out ’til I feel okay” she sings on “it could be anything”) features throughout. Self-loathing proliferates: “I hate me too,” she sings on “lover’s spit plays in the background.” The album is full of sexual longing but links romance to feelings of inadequacy: “Spending half of my whole life giving you head, just in case you need to forgive me one day,” she admits on “head.” Exploring the “infinite void” described in “4pm,” rousay finds a dense tangle of memories, confessions, and emotions.
rousay’s concern across sentiment is not so much that these feelings will overwhelm her, but that they might be crushed into numbness—“an even worse reality,” as her note in “4PM” concludes. The album’s steady, lethargic pacing mirrors rousay’s dejection; “asking for it” swells dramatically before quickly petering out, as if it has lost its will.
rousay explores anhedonia most affectingly through her voice, using Auto-Tune to give it a robotic quality. Inspired by Young Thug and Sparklehorse, she used the effect on last year’s single “Sigh in My Ear” as well as on Bandcamp uploads like “meg,” “a bullshit creative (dressing room demo)” and “new monkey (unfinished elliott smith cover).” The vocal effect was stark and incongruous in these one-offs, seemingly applied mainly for its striking sound. In sentiment, however, by crushing rousay’s emotive outpourings into a neutral, dehumanized monotone, the effect becomes a powerful conceptual device, exploring the way despair can give way to numbness and exhaustion.