claire rousay & zander raymond – something good
claire rousay and zander raymond today announce their debut collaborative album, something good, out January 29 via Thrill Jockey.
The two composers and sound artists, based in Los Angeles and Chicago respectively, built the record from an open-ended exchange across their two cities, made in and around domestic spaces.
To introduce the project, rousay and raymond unveil lead single “can’t we have both.”
One of two vocal tracks on the album, it comes closest to a conventional song and marked a turning point for rousay, who restructured the files raymond sent and added her own vocals on top. The process felt new to her and propelled the creation of the rest of the album. With more tracks than any other piece on the record, it also proved challenging to mix, as rousay worked to balance song form and sound design without letting either take the foreground.
Lyrically, the song looks outward, reflecting on the idea of “trends” as a whole. It touches on Barney’s Beanery becoming a Gen Z party spot in LA, IPA beers as a millennial trend that crashed hard, and pop culture references ranging from Yung Lean to CVS Pharmacy, all while considering how an artist finds their place in it all.
rousay has steadily become one of the most prolific and widely admired voices in experimental pop, making hushed, deeply felt music built from recordings of everyday life, set against piano, strings, and electronic textures, with detours into rock, noise, and folk. Her recent work includes the full-lengths sentiment (2024) and a little death (2025), collaborative albums with more eaze and Martyna Basta, and the newly released solo EP on holding.
raymond is an interdisciplinary artist and musician whose work across mediums is rooted in improvisation. In music, he highlights the musicality of the ordinary through field recordings paired with synthesizers, pianos, harmonicas, and more. He has authored or appeared on roughly a dozen albums over the last five years, including his latest solo album, no one notices the fly, featuring M. Sage and Lia Kohl. In visual art, he creates collages from found paper, ephemera, and everyday debris, drawing on this practice to create the album art for something good.
something good brings their practices onto equal footing, moving between pop song structures and new music abstractions and drawing on piano, synthesizer, electric guitar, harmonica, pipe organ, and vocals. The recording locations, from homes to studios, were equally varied and became part of the album itself. Room sounds and reverb shape the listener’s sense of place, but the environment is never static or identifiable. “It was made far more spontaneously… more just playing,” raymond says. “Music making [is] a broad umbrella that spans from sitting down intentionally to compose and leaving a field recorder rolling.” The process itself became part of the finished music: casual work made in domestic spaces, with space and perspective in flux, distance erased, and fragments delicately layered.
#clairerousay #zanderraymond