The Los Angeles–based writer and musician Claire Cronin creates work that consistently gravitates toward folk horror and a sense of spiritual unease. Her 2020 book Blue Light Of The Screen explores her fixation with horror cinema, a throughline that also colors her music. Cronin’s newest song, however, presents itself as a lush lullaby about how she’ll miss the world once it ends.
She laid down the tracks for her forthcoming album The Bruise with her husband and longtime collaborator Ezra Buchla, formerly of the Mae Shi and Gowns, with contributions from friends like Julia Holter and Deerhoof’s John Dieterich. We’ve already featured the lead single, “Black Water.” The track “Before The End Of Time” places Cronin’s voice and guitar at the forefront, Buchla provides strings and processing, and Mark Wessels adds a musical saw. It unfolds as a slow, radiant torch song. It could be labeled doom-folk, though Cronin views it as a touch more classical in temperament. Here’s Cronin on the song and the crowd-sourced video:
This piece dwells in a deep sense of nostalgia, grief, and a fear of collapse in a world that feels perched on the edge of ruin. I was thinking about paranoia and delusion, and I recalled walks I used to take in east Hollywood, where helicopters circled overhead.
When I reach the chorus, I picture myself as the ghost of an old crooner—perhaps a Sinatra-like presence—singing to the victims of a shipwreck. By the end, the longing becomes so intense that I want to be released from time itself.
To create the video, I issued a call on social media for contributions, inviting people to share brief clips of things they believe they’ll miss at the end of time, at the end of life, or at the end of the world—however they chose to interpret that idea. I selected from those entries, added a few of my own, and edited everything together, aiming to choreograph the transitions to the movement of the song.
I found it poignant that many of the submissions repeated similar motifs—that sense of coastline, bodies of water, skies, trees, children, animals, and glimmering lights.
Check it out below.
The Bruise is out 10/9 on Orindal Records/A Moth Object.
