Clara Joy presents her latest album What We Have Now as a love letter to New York City—albeit one that emphasizes the alienation, gentrification, heartbreak, inevitable mental breakdowns, and other facets of city life that make it a truly warts-and-all production. Yet the final single arriving before the record’s release this Friday via Shimmy-Disc takes a step back and addresses some of these anxieties as they pertain to our lives online, particularly the rise of DIY e-tail sites and their steady pivot to social media spaces.
“When I was writing this song, I was on the floor of my bedroom playing guitar and a notification popped up on my phone from Depop saying ‘[user] just liked your item,’ and I just started repeating ‘You just liked my item’ on my guitar,” Joy shares of the new track, “You Just Liked My Item”—a somber acoustic ballad balancing the songwriter’s blunt lyricism against an eerily sparse instrumental backdrop. “It felt like a funny thing to say in a song at first, and then I realized it reflected a kind of technological OCD. Living under a technocracy impacts our ability to make our own choices as we become more and more steeped in algorithmic channels, etc. It’s funny, because on Depop you get an algorithm of clothing you ‘might be interested in’ every day—this isn’t clothing you searched for, but the algorithm’s guess of what you’d like. So you’re constantly in a simulacra of your own ‘individuality’—which isn’t even chosen by you.”
Regarding that sparse instrumental, she adds: “The song was originally very fast, but Kramer [the album’s co-producer] suggested we try approaching it like a dirge, so I recomposed the song. The song naturally was stripped down—but for my vocals I took on different attitudes/characters to try and create a desperate, creepy feeling in my performance of the beginning of the song. Kramer’s production brought the track to a uniquely colorful yet dark atmosphere, which to me really emphasized the vision for this song.”
Joy’s vision for the song is further solidified with a clever music video by Su Koko that sees the track’s lyrics displayed on a wall of staticky TVs. Check it out below, and pre-order What We Have Now here.
