Clara Mann, the London-based singer-songwriter, is due to release her first full-length album ‘Rift’ on Friday under state51’s label. Mann’s discography and style as a whole acts as a graceful insight into the relationships and experiences the artist has endured through her adolescence into her adulthood – Mann inhales the people and places she has known, and exhales an accumulation of tender lyrics and soft instrumental pieces, which could be compared to the works of artists such as Big Thief, Tom Odell and Billie Marten in their gentle essences.
Since her first single, ‘I Didn’t Know You Were Leaving Today’ was released in November of 2020, Clara Mann has stayed true to her benign artistry over the past five years, especially in the new tracks on ‘Rift. ’ This album is a careful, evocative observation of Mann’s personal emotions, gently digging up raw sensitivities and translating them into plaintive musical reflections.
A standout track on the album comes in the shape of ‘Remember Me – Train Song.’ True to its title, this song is exactly what one would want to accompany them through their headphones on a long train journey whilst staring out of the window into the world beyond – the track is an elegant delve into lost memories, transitional and liminal emotions, and uncertainty regarding one’s future. Mann’s vocals, not only on this track but on all others on the album, are simply exquisite, with possible comparison to be made to vocalists such as Adrienne Lenker and Hayley Heynderickx in their delicate execution.
Mann’s work is quite clearly renowned for its vulnerable honesty – unafraid to tap into visceral, unfeigned emotions and experiences in order to elicit the deep-rooted meanings behind her songs, the artist intelligently uses her life lessons for her creative benefit. This is especially prevalent on the first track of the album, ‘It Only Hurts’, in which Mann taps into how she has contended with her loss of optimism and hope in romantic connections she has had. The song holds some wistful, reflective lyrics such as ‘If loving you is so wrong, then I will live in shame’, looking into how unavoidable love and attraction can be even when it is to the detriment of one or both counterparts. Although this track seems quite melancholy at a surface level, the singer’s conviction and hopefulness remain a guiding force throughout the album as a whole, letting her listeners know that a loss of optimism and hope does not have to mean a loss of one’s potential future.
The album as a whole is a complex amalgamation of Mann’s lessons in romance, grieving, and learning everything the hard way, from scratch – a beautifully executed attempt at normalising non-linear growth and dispensing personal life lessons to wider audiences, ‘Rift’ is a haunting and ethereal collection of songs, serving as a strong foundation for Mann’s potential future full-length albums.