Clara Mann – Rift

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In the space of a debut album, Clara Mann has gone from ‘one to watch’ to one of the best songwriters in the country.

I confess that I have been looking forward to Rift, Clara Mann’s debut album, for quite some time now. The singer-songwriter first came to my attention a few years back when she was part of Green Man Festival’s new music initiative, Green Man Rising. Her first EP, Consolations (2021), showcased four tracks of quietly confident, shifting folk music, indebted but not in thrall to the likes of Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake and Shelagh McDonald. A second EP – 2022’s Stay Open – saw her hone her shimmering songs, adding a shuffling, soft-footed rhythm section that did nothing to dispel the low-key, low-lit appeal of her songcraft.

Stadiums is stripped right back – just Mann’s singing and minimal piano – and is all the better for it. You can hear every nuance of her voice, you become aware at every instant of the emotion it holds, of how close it is to cracking. It provides a stark and perhaps ironic contrast to the song’s lyrical message, as Mann dreams ‘of glory and stadiums.’ Even when the musical accompaniment is at its fullest – on Oranges, for example, where a background sheen and a percussive beat with the pace of a death-knell harbours a lyrical examination of the end of a relationship – the songs are stark and their emotional resonances immediate.

So many of Mann’s songs, as calm as they seem on the surface, are about rupture or imbalance, about travel or the act of leaving. Even the album’s title is suggestive of severance, and the title track tells a moving story of separation and independence. For Mann, though, the rift is not necessarily a negative thing; it can be enlightening and revealing, something that gives a clear sight into the artist’s processes and her inner thoughts. ‘I wanted people to feel like they were looking into my world’, she said in a recent interview with The New Age Magazine, and she achieves this openness with an admirable lack of the kind of hand-wringing that characterises much of what passes for confessional poetry.

A large part of her gift is her ability to alchemise her specific experience into a universal emotional reaction, something she does with lightness and an ear for a concise and cutting phrase. Opener It Only Hurts has hints of existentialism in its lyrical bearing, something that can perhaps be traced back to Mann’s upbringing in France and to the affinity she feels with French-language songwriters like Jacques Brel.

She has a knack for layering recognisable symbols, and on Rift one of the most important symbols is the car, something that represents escape and travel and freedom, but also, paradoxically, confinement and entrapment. Driving Home the Long Way has a pretty, sad melody that seems to circle back on itself, and you’re never quite sure if the lyrics should be parsed literally or metaphorically, or both. Trains, as well as cars, make frequent appearances in Mann’s songs, and Remember Me (Train Song) represents a kind of turning point on this album. Set against a delicately fingerpicked guitar, the melody is so languid that you hardly know it’s there, and then Mann introduces her piano alongside some soft drums, and the song takes a slinkier, more beguiling turn. It is a song about memory, about the need to be remembered, and it seems to play with its own fleetingness.

‘Til I Come Around has a gently scuffed drumbeat that gives it the flavour of closing time at a late-night jazz joint, and it’s worth noting that in places, Mann’s singing owes as much to jazz as it does to folk. Elsewhere, as on the sweet Reasons, she approaches the clarity of Anne Briggs’ Go Your Way. We are constantly reminded of the closeness of the recording: the squeak of guitar strings and Mann’s every breath are captured with almost painful precision, a technique that amplifies the emotional hit of a song like Doubled Over, which like much of the album deals with the very real pain of a breakup. The final song, The Dream, neatly and knowingly captures all of the album’s themes and preoccupations in one place. Here, Mann reverts entirely to piano, the instrument she played (with a high degree of skill) throughout the early part of her musical career. It feels like a comment on the circularity of things, on coming home after a long and troubled journey. It sounds sombre at first, but there is an undeniable note of joy or hope at play too. That so many emotions are being unpacked, examined and realigned at the same time shows just how accomplished a songwriter she has become, and in such a short space of time too. In the space of a debut album, Clara Mann has gone from ‘one to watch’ to one of the best songwriters in the country.

Rift (March 7th, 2025) states51

Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Drift

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