UK three-piece The Clientele have released the latest single off their upcoming LP I Am Not There Anymore, out July 28th via Merge Records. “Claire’s Not Real” is winsome and thoughtful, a bossa nova-boosted meditation that reads more like an amicable separation than a divorce from reality. “Is it written on my face? / I don’t know, I don’t know anyway / But there’s something I can do / Here with you, here with you,” frontman Alasdair Maclean intones, as cinematic violins and lightly plucked guitars revolve around him.
Maclean describes The Clientele’s music as a cloud separating internal experience from reality. “It’s that feeling of not being there,” he says. “What’s really been in all the Clientele records is a sense of not actually inhabiting the moment that your body is in.”
Listen to “Claire’s Not Real” here.