Super Monster Claud Revels In The 'Gay Shit'

Once COVID-19 production shutdowns forced several musicians to record alone for the opening time, indie-pop ingenue Claud Mintz had a leg up. They started writing and releasing music in 2018 because the lead of Toast, a now-defunct lo-fi duo they formed as a college student with their best friend, producer Josh Mehling. Nevertheless they lived in the same city and attended university with each other, the pair recorded separately by sending instrumental tracks or half-baked song ideas back and forth. “We've never been able to prepare music in the same room,” Claud, who performs mononymously, tells MTV News over Zoom while hunkered down in Los Angeles. “If we are in the same room, we get distracted or we get embarrassed, and we just can't do it. So it didn't feel unusual because that's what I’ve been doing this whole time.”


Under a mop of cotton candy-colored curls, Claud is humble and soft-spoken, although don’t let that fool you into thinking they don’t know what they’re talking about. At 21, Claud has already released the eight-track EP Sideline Star, collaborated with their bedroom-pop contemporary Clairo, and caught a person's eye of Grammy-nominated indie-rocker Phoebe Bridgers. Their full-length debut, Super Monster, drops Friday (February 12) by means of the Saddest Factory, Bridgers’s fledgling record label. To date, Claud is Saddest Factory’s only signee. “I was in conversation with a number of other labels,” they remember. “But I order kind of felt like, if I was going to sign and to really trust the team that I was going to sign to, I'd want it to be somebody who is aware my perspective and an artist that I could really trust creatively.” Bridgers, an industry-savvy powerhouse with “her finger on the pulse,” fit the bill.


Toast is no longer with each other, although Claud is still BFFs with Mehling, who played on and co-produced a couple of songs from Super Monster, including the winking single “Cuff Your Jeans” and the self-reflective finale “Falling With the Rain.” The album also features contributions from production duo Zach & Roger and Dan Nigro, who was in back of Olivia Rodrigo’s runaway hit single “Drivers License.” Mehling and Claud’s choice to retire Toast was entirely amicable: Soon after their earliest releases gained some traction, the psychedelic metal band The Marias and option trio Triathlon approached Claud and Mehling about joining their tour. Mehling passed in favor of staying in school, yet Claud agreed. “[Josh] was like, ‘Just go for a couple of months,’” they recall. “And then several months turned into a number of years.”


Toward the tail end of the Toast era, Bridgers noticed Claud’s music and “really fancied it,” they remember. “We began having meetings, and she’d come to my shows.” Wow, remember shows? Claud does, fondly. Case in point, promoting their new record while in the pandemic means they plan to miss out on one of their preference live-music moments: singing their some days “very jarring lyrics” to a unsuspecting audience. They cite “Wish You Were Gay” (the genuinely queer Claud cut, not the petty Billie Eilish song) as a prime example. “Seeing people's reactions was just so fun.”


Claud’s songwriting fashion is autobiographical, and so they have been open about being queer and nonbinary while in their career. Coming out, as we understand it in the established sense, was never a calculated decision. “I think whether I was out or not, I'd still be writing about gay shit because I am gay,” they explain with a shrug.


Indeed, “gay shit” is everywhere on Super Monster. The record is a hodgepodge of songs written and recorded before and while in the pandemic, although Claud’s bright sound and contemplative songwriting are present while in. It features two tracks named soon after old flames: “Ana,” a wistful letter to an ex soon after a mutual breakup, and “Jordan,” an angstier cut about a unhealthy relationship. “Bet you didn’t know I won’t let a straight man throw me off,” Claud insists in the pre-chorus of the playfully defiant “That’s Mr. Bitch to You.”


Even the album’s title — a reference to a sketch by late visual artist and musician Daniel Johnston called “Claud the Super Monster” — can be interpreted as a metaphor for exploring gender behind the binary. Claud isn’t a superhero or a monster; they’re a “super monster,” defying the rigid labels and tired archetypes we’ve all been conditioned to uphold. “It's all a metaphor,” Claud says with a knowing laugh.


But openness isn’t without its drawbacks. Claud points out that, in most press coverage, their identity is said before their name. “It was something I found this summer,” they mention. “Every article about me [was titled] ‘queer artist Claud’ or ‘nonbinary artist Claud.’” Obviously, being able to have a career as an out recording artist is a good thing, along with a relatively new phenomenon. However this “label-y” mindset, as Claud calls it, can feel tokenizing to marginalized artists and distract from their work. For Claud, whose songs tell deeply personalized stories of yearning and heartbreak, who they are can be heard in the music. “Cuff Your Jeans,” a memorable cut off Super Monster, is so sonically lush that it’s easy to miss the self-aware reference to that enduring joke about how some style their denim.


Claud, ever educated in back of their years, proposes an eas solution to this complex dilemma. “If you wish to highlight [queer] artists, just do it,” they mention. “You don’t have to mention you’re doing it.”