Although Dodie Clark came to fame for her chatty and intimate viral videos, she proves the exception to the rule about internet stars making terrible music. Her debut studio album spotlights the sparse and self-conscious folk-pop she’s been making for nearly a decade.
From Logan Paul’s Santa Claus diss track to the whoah-inducing pop of TikTok’s Addison Rae, many viral internet stars have tried to maximize their influence by creating music. This usually leads to a lot of meme trap and middling R&B, but every now and again, there’s an exception—like 25-year-old Dodie Clark, who has been uploading videos to her YouTube channel with nearly 2 million subscribers since 2011. Her debut studio album Build A Problem is an official unveiling of the sparse and self-conscious folk pop she has been posting online for nearly a decade, a career milestone for an artist who has, for the most part, been relegated to YouTube.
Although her first YouTube video is an original song called “Rain,” Clark gained subscribers not solely because of music, but because she made videos about jellybeans and bisexuality, candidly discussing her mental health while boiling pasta drunk in her kitchen. For a lot of young, struggling fans, including 19-year-old me, her videos were the ultimate salve, with their glowy, bluish lighting and Clark’s intimate mode of address. Although these videos have been unlisted and moved to a second channel, presumably in an effort to make Clark appear more serious as an artist, the vulnerability in them shines through on Build A Problem.
The music on this album is nothing if not twee, prioritizing lush vocal harmonies and shy, plucky acoustic guitar. Despite the soothing tones, Clark often finds herself swallowed by misery and bitter self-effacement in the lyrics. On “Cool Girl,” Clark wonders “How much of a tongue can I bite/until we notice blood.” On “Sorry,” Clark’ identifies herself as a monster in a small voice over stormy violins. Her emphasis on harmony, billowy vibrato, and the dutiful acoustic strumming often recalls early Ingrid Michaelson or A Fine Frenzy. Sometimes Clark departs from this candied, folk-pop sound and ventures into something closer to contemporary musical theater, coupling production melodrama with straight-shooting melodies, like on the pleasurably tense and self-serious “Before the Line.”
But some of Clark’s genre experiments are less successful. Instrumental transition tracks “?” and “.”, both feel uninformative and ungrounded. They’re the instrumental equivalents to Clark’s occasional lyrical problem, where she obscures her meaning so much that you start wondering what she’s talking about. On “Boys Like You,” Clark tells us “there’s a name for boys like you” without ever really elaborating. The political ache of “Guiltless'' turns up hollow when the most incisive lyric in it is an opaque reference to how “a dark politician will end up alone.”
But Clark isn’t totally averse to being explicit, especially when the subject is Clark herself. She tells us plainly that she hates herself, ruefully revisits drinking until 5AM to justify desperate hook ups, and admits that, at “24, I still count everyone I kiss.” These clear, specific songs carry the same appeal of Clark’s tender and intimate old vlogs. They’re not too complicated, and the experiences they describe aren’t terribly unique, but they’re presented with the kind of surprising honesty you usually feel when reading through drunken Notes app confessions. They lay out insecurity in detail without scrutinizing or justifying it, making you want to lay yourself bare, too. Sometimes, you don’t want to think too hard. You want to put on a big sweater and complain. You want to listen to something soft and sad, look out the window and remember how embarrassing you have been. Clark knows that feeling well—her music is made for it.
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