Claud began Supermodels at the end. In late 2021, they released their winning debut, Super Monster, but soon found life turned upside down by departure, loss, and voids where support networks once stood. So, of course, they started writing, using not only their new acoustic guitar (a rare one, but so desiccated from the city’s winter it wouldn’t stay in tune) and a second-hand upright piano recently wedged inside the apartment (free, but tuned hopelessly down, with multiple missing octaves).

Claud’s apartment, with that stubborn acoustic guitar and worn piano, came to articulate a lot of the experiences that underlie Supermodels itself. Fissures in romances and friendships, pressures of recording careers, the casualties of growing up, the laugh lines of life: Each of these 13 songs, as Claud puts it, is another journal entry, threaded together with scant regard for genre but, like the best pop music, with hooks that linger as powerfully as any memory.

Claud approaches all of Supermodels with new depth and the kind of humor that only comes with undeniable new confidence, rendered in structures and hooks that are deceptively sophisticated. Genre becomes Claud’s playground, an obstacle course full of supposed barriers to climb over and cavort upon. Where Super Monster was rendered mostly in their childhood bedroom, Supermodels was created in Claud’s own space, with a team of confidants and collaborators.