After breaking out with noisy, raging debut album Without The Eyes in 2020, Brighton electro-punks CLT DRP have had something of a rethink on this year’s follow-up. But don’t mistake Nothing Clever, Just Feelings to not still emphatically take on the vital issues swirling in the mind of singer Annie Dorrett…
“I feel like I spend a lot of my life yelling at people,” begins CLT DRP’s Annie Dorrett (they/them). Admittedly, the Brighton-based electro-punk act historically haven’t done much to help change this perception – their 2020 debut album Without The Eyes sounded like a wild cat backed into a corner, lashing out at society, the patriarchy, the listener. But now, with their long-awaited follow-up Nothing Clever, Just Feelings, it seems Annie has had something of a change of heart.
“I don’t think people change their mind by being yelled at,” they muse. Whilst CLT DRP’s forthright lyricism (‘I love my body but I’d never wanna choose it’) has always struck a chord with listeners who want to interrogate their approach to feminism, learn from their mistakes and do better next time, Nothing Clever, Just Feelings resides even more in the uncertain space between black and white, right and wrong. Or, as Annie puts it, “I’m getting older, and more confused.”
In part, this comes from realising that the world, and feminism, is so much more than the microaggressions that white, cis folk face (we’ll get into Annie’s own gender realisations later). “I was humbled quite a few times by older generations and other people… There are things I haven’t experienced and I want to try to be less preachy,” Annie considers. And these tweaks can be smaller, too: “How do I make minuscule changes instead of calling loads of people out? I miss being blindly angry at the world, I miss when I thought about things in black and white. It was so much easier. But that’s not how I feel right now. I’m just going to talk about my own experiences, and listen.”
So, what has Annie been experiencing recently? Well, a lot of “weird gender stuff”, and heartbreak. “I was dating someone who said to me, ‘I’ll still find you attractive no matter what your pronouns are,’” Annie reveals. “I feel like a lot of cis men do that: say that they’ll date a they/them person but actually they’re just not seeing that person. It stung for a lot of different reasons. It taught me a lot.”
Being queer, and specifically gender-fluid, has changed Annie’s attitudes towards their politics, opinions, and therefore their lyrics. “I thought, ‘Did I love this person or did I just need validation from them?’ Growing up AFAB [assigned female at birth], I think you can get kind of confused about that.” The title-track of Nothing Clever, Just Feelings is in direct response to this heartbreak, and is fuelled by pure, cathartic emotion – “I could give you a timestamp on every single one of those lyrics…” – and an allusion to the “still chaotic, but controlled chaos” that Annie says embodies this album.
Having come to the realisation that they were gender-fluid after releasing Without The Eyes, some of the lyrical content on the band’s debut doesn’t even sit well with them anymore. “I was 18 – I’d just learnt what feminism was. It doesn’t feel quite as queer-inclusive as I’d like it to be now. I love those old songs but there wasn’t enough intersectionality. Now I feel more like I want to rip apart the binary, rather than holding onto this treasured, feminine part of myself. I’m not fighting for just that anymore.
“This time, the stuff I was writing about was much less in-your-face political,” Annie continues. The music is still political – “It non-directly brings awareness to certain topics” – but these elements ultimately begin with their own personal experiences. After all, when you are queer, the personal is inescapably political.
The careful consideration in Annie’s lyricism is also reflected in the growth in musicianship between CLT DRP’s two albums, which is starkly noticeable, the band having been on tour with various artists over the years, learning on the fly and taking inspiration from the musicians around them. “We put a different level of thought into this new album, as musicians,” says Annie proudly. “Having played with as many people as we’ve played with, gigging so much, being inspired by the people we’ve seen and the feedback to how those songs were received live.”
And because of the band’s widening experiences, Nothing Clever, Just Feelings is even more of a smorgasbord of genres and sounds than their first album. “I love screaming and I love heavy music. But I also love pop music and I love dance music. We weren’t afraid this time to have some of the album sound a bit more accessible.
“The first album was chaotic,” they add of recording Without The Eyes. “We kind of just… barfed out what we all sound like individually and put it into songs. It was very raw. I’d finish a shift and then turn up to record a vocal part, and then go back to work. We weren’t always together, we weren’t always listening to each other’s parts, we weren’t talking to the producer as much as we did this time. For Nothing Clever, Just Feelings, we approached it as a piece of art, rather than just putting our live sound onto a record.”
So has this move towards controlled chaos been gratifying?
“All my life I’ve had a chip on my shoulder about being taken seriously,” Annie confesses. “And I thought that this music wouldn’t be taken seriously if there isn’t some hidden, complex meaning [in the lyrics].” And Nothing Clever, Just Feelings as an album title very much seems to be a tongue-in-cheek allusion to Annie ridding themselves of this notion. “Don’t get me wrong, I do think my lyrics are clever. But I also think this music is meant for everybody. It’s emotional. It’s not overly complex and it’s very chaotic.
“That should be respected.”
Nothing Clever, Just Feelings is due out on September 8 via Venn Records. CLT DRP tour the UK later this year
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