photo courtesy of Claire Cronin
by Dan Goldin (@paintingwithdan)
Claire Cronin songs are commonly described as “folk horror,” occupying a place that is haunted but gorgeous, reflecting on life in the shadows but not dwelling in them. Her songs live and breathe in the late night hours, channeling “spiritual dread” with a sense of warmth, the flicker of a solitary candle lighting the path beyond. Her third album, The Bruise, is said to be inspired by both doom metal and avant-garde drone music, but while they might play into Cronin’s languid structures, they do not play into the sound. Emotionally heavy and weary of our world, her music is soft, gentle, and built around her unflinching vocals and acoustic textures. Set for release on October 9th via Orindal Records (Ruth Garbus, Spencer Radcliffe, Duffy x Uhlmann), Cronin is obscuring visions of engrained terror with serenity, her words a surrealist meditation on shifting morbidity, familial grief, and the profundity of bringing the next generation into the world.
“Before the End of Time” is the record’s second single, a beautifully sparse composition that ruminates on the thoughts that rush through our mind when it all comes to an end. Claire Cronin plays with a slow-drawn intensity, the song moving at a languid pace, lush with sweeping contributions from Cronin’s husband, collaborator, and mixing engineer Ezra Buchla (viola) and Mark Wessels (musical saw). With a dreamy yet dreary lullaby atmosphere, Cronin’s words ring gently upon the air, lost in thought and uninterested in drawing definitive conclusions.
Speaking about the song and music video, Cronin shared:
“This one is about feeling deep nostalgia, grief, and a fear of apocalypse in a world that’s on the edge of ruin. I was thinking about paranoia and delusion, and remembering walks I took when I lived in east Hollywood, where helicopters were always circling.
When I sing the chorus, I like to imagine I’m the ghost of an old crooner like Frank Sinatra, singing to the victims of a shipwreck. At the end of the song, my sense of longing is too intense and I ask to be taken out of time.
To make this video, I put out a call on social media for contributions, asking people to send me short clips of things they think they’ll miss at the end of time, the end of their lives, or the end of the world — however they wished to interpret that. I chose from among those entries, added a few of my own, and then edited it all together. I tried to make the transitions match the movements of the song.
I found it poignant that there was a lot of repetition in what people sent me— so many coastlines, bodies of water, skies, trees, children, animals, and shimmering lights.”