“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.”