THE NEWYORKER, AUGUST 19, 2019 65
ments on the excesses and the pleasures
of pop. These artists—who are far cheek-
ier and slicker than the musicians who
make up the bedroom scene—treat pop
music like a text meant to be joked about
and deconstructed.
“Immunity,” Cottrill’s impressive and
deeply touching full-length début album,
which was released earlier this month,
shows that she is too sincere to approach
her music as an art-school project. But
she is also too ambitious to languish in
the fuzzed-out, D.I.Y. world of bed-
room pop. For this record, Cottrill paired
up with Rostam Batmanglij, the pro-
duction whiz behind Vampire Week-
end and various other projects on the
fringes of the mainstream. There is an
air of newfound professionalism to “Im-
munity,” but it does not undermine the
simplicity of her sound. Cottrill is not
an especially gifted or forceful singer,
but she manages to project a range of
emotion in a muted register, sounding
both shy and resolute. “Immunity” feels
like a collection of small-scale water-
colors, delicately blurring shades of synth
pop, grunge, and confessional indie rock.
Earlier, on songs like “Pretty Girl”
and “4EVER”—the catchy centerpiece
of “diary 001”—Cottrill revelled in teen-
age clichés, never asking questions more
complex than “Am I gonna feel this way
forever?” “Immunity” has a heightened
emotional specificity. On the opening
track, Cottrill remembers a day when
her life was saved after an act of self-
harm. “You call me seven times, one, two,
three, four, on the line,” she whispers.
“Swear I could’ve done it / If you weren’t
there when I hit the floor.” Cottrill re-
sists theatrics, and the contours of this
disturbing scene become clear only after
repeated listens. Cottrill has said that
“Bags,” a despairing indie-rock song, is
about her first physical encounter with
another woman—she recently said that
she is not straight—but she does not
play up this context in the lyrics. At
a time when audiences have become
hyper-focussed on the social and sexual
open-mindedness of Gen Z artists, Cot-
trill refuses to allow anyone to fetishize
her experiences.
Cottrill’s rapid ascent did not come
without consternation. After the success
of “Pretty Girl,” online commenters at-
tributed her popularity to the music-busi-
ness connections of her father, Geoff
Cottrill. Geoff is a marketing executive
who has worked extensively with Con-
verse and Coca-Cola—the sort of youth-
obsessed brands eager to sponsor musi-
cians in exchange for credibility. He had
ties to an owner of the music imprint
FADER Label, which ultimately signed
his daughter. There is plenty of nepo-
tism in the industry, but “Immunity”
proves that Cottrill didn’t deserve the
Internet’s ire. The record has an emo-
tional sophistication that would be nearly
impossible to manufacture.
“Immunity” is the rare album whose
second half is more ambitious than its
first. Its seven-minute closing track, “I
Wouldn’t Ask You,” contains several songs
in one. Partway through, Cottrill comes
as close to anger as she ever has in her
music. “Baby wake the fuck up / Time for
you to grow up / Don’t you know that life
is rarely ever fair?” she demands, before
saying, in the chorus, “I wouldn’t ask you
to take care of me.” She might be sing-
ing about a bygone lover, a friend, her
parents, or the industry at large, and in-
sisting on her ability to stand on her own.
This could seem like an assertion of ma-
turity, but Cottrill layers a chorus of voices
of children—the only guest vocalists that
appear on the album—over her own, cre-
ating a stirring sense of the purgatory be-
tween adolescence and adulthood.
Cottrill recently performed at Mad-
ison Square Garden, opening for Kha-
lid, another late-nineties baby who mines
the digital-native teen-age experience in
his music, albeit with less nuance. (His
début album was called “American
Teen.”) His bruised, genre-agnostic music
might have been called bedroom pop
had it not sailed to arena-pop status so
quickly. The unassuming Cottrill wore
an emerald-green jumpsuit, her hair piled
into a messy bun. She was backed by a
three-piece band, which had not quite
figured out how to render her intensely
personal songs on a large stage, and added
grand drum and guitar flourishes to their
final notes. Cottrill sang in her charac-
teristically measured, breathy voice, and
her lyrics were lost in the din of ticket-
holders streaming into the venue. On-
stage, she was preserved in a strange
bubble—not quite commanding enough
to be a star, not quite mundane enough
to be one of us. After her final song,
“4EVER,” she air-kissed the crowd and
told them her name. WHAT’S
THE
BIG
IDEA?
Small space
has big rewards.ADVERTISEMENT
TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT
JILLIAN GENET
305.520.5159
[email protected]