Joshua Lu’s pick reminds us of that eternal adage: Everything Is Embarrassing.
[Video]
[6.91]
[9]
William John: Despite its title, this is ostensibly a song about ennui and disaffection, advancing the idea that thirst traps are usually less about a desire for connection than a hope that a fleeting moment of attention might curtail the boredom of daily life. It’s a pity then that a potentially interesting subject is wasted on such bland sound design: a foamy post-Taylor wash, indistinguishable from that proffered by Hobert’s childhood best friend and collaborator Gracie Abrams, which struggles to promote much enthusiasm.
[5]
Ian Mathers: It’s honestly really strange to me that Hobert’s voice here sounds so much like Gracie Abrams, and less surprising that the songwriting here reminds me of Abrams since Hobert co-wrote the singles I liked from The Story of Us. But! The production is a little more interesting to me than anything I’ve heard from Abrams, the bit in the chorus about thinking pictures of yourself look bad is intensely relatable, and the video is very funny and charming. I don’t think I’ll have trouble telling their voices apart for very long.
[8]
Claire Davidson: My first exposure to Audrey Hobert was hearing “Sue Me” on the radio. While I, like everyone, was shocked at how uncannily similar her vocal cadence and phrasing are to her frequent collaborator Gracie Abrams, the song’s pummelingly simple synth melody remained such a potent earworm that I grew to appreciate Hobert’s humor in spite of myself. (The off-the-wall video, if nothing else, makes as good a case for her artistry as any.) Where Abrams’s mopey frustrations typically read as pessimistic, Hobert possesses a playful exuberance that lends her self-deprecation a refreshing degree of levity, an approach that, coupled with the surprising cleverness of her solo material, makes her a stealthily compelling pop presence. “Thirst Trap” doesn’t quite have the blunt immediacy of “Sue Me,” nor the wiry color, instead anchoring its verses to an acoustic guitar jangle that evaporates by the time the chorus arrives. This, in turn, forces Hobert’s wispier tone to compete with mounting percussion and little else, a poor choice for a singer who already doesn’t command much body in the mix. Still, there aren’t many pop songs predicated on the idea that having a crush makes you a less interesting person, and Hobert’s mournful depiction of the person she becomes when monomaniacally fixated on a guy is funny enough in conceit alone to make up for the track’s more anodyne background. If anything, given Hobert’s lamentation of how “vacant” she now is, that blandness seems to be part of the point.
[6]
Will Adams: The production is nice — the tumbling drums and late-game sax solo evoke the sparkle of E•MO•TION. And while it’s a relatable tale of feeling past one’s prime as far as being hip and happening, Hobert’s overstuffed lyric style means an increased risk of some real clunkers, like “I used to be so super cool / now I’m in the box with all the tools.”
[5]
Katherine St. Asaph: An interestingly brash sax solo that you have to slog through less interesting Abrams-isms to reach.
[6]
Nortey Dowuona: The cascading drums played by Miles Morris feel like they should be hammering, shuddering as they stomp out of your speakers. Instead they feel like a collapse of the pattern into a heavy handed snar,e and I can only ask so much of the mixer, Jon Castelli. With Bad Suns, Morris’s drums sound crisp, full and lovely, filling their place as the bedrock of the mix, somehow becoming a propulsive force allowing the melodies to coalesce and cohere. Not so much here. I returned to “Thirst Trap” to listen more intently, and much to my horror, the drums were still over-compressed, the only distinct sound they could make being the THWACK of the snare, preventing the diving rumble of the toms and the heavy, lumbering swing of the kick from settling into a groove or even swinging the bassline or topline melody into a stranger, bolder frame, wasting a good drum pattern played by Morris; or worse, trying and failing to assemble a listenable drum arrangement out of very poorly tracked takes from Pièce Eatah, who seemed to also be off his game. Thank goodness Audrey isn’t.
[6]
Julian Axelrod: On paper, Audrey Hobert represents everything I was sick of talking about this year: nepo babies, relatability, Gracie Abrams, etc. But then I finally checked out Who’s the Clown? and had the experience every pop album aspires to deliver, in which each song hits on first listen before burrowing into your subconscious and emerging as a sleeper favorite in the subsequent weeks and months. At the risk of invoking another insufferable 2025 conversation, “Thirst Trap” is peak coworker music — not only in its broad appeal, but in Hobert’s ability to make every hilarious couplet feel like a whispered confession on a smoke break from the coolest girl you work with at Panera. She’s so good at blowing up minor everyday grievances (in this case, the all-consuming tunnel vision of a new crush) into miserably relatable widescreen epics. If you’ve ever had to delete 100 terrible nudes to free up space on your camera roll, this one’s for you.
[8]
Andrew Karpan: Sure, the Audrey Hobert song solves a certain problem with the Taylor Swift record, as a kind of hip object of aspirational poptimist universality, but in order to tell you what that problem is, I’d have to take one of those college courses on Swiftology and I can’t take out more loans, okay?
[7]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Doing pop star linear algebra to figure out that Gracie Abrams-without-Gracie Abrams is worth about 4 additional points on balance; I like other songs off this album better but this one benefits from the clarity of purpose with which Hobert says something as dumb as “420 Blaze It.”
[7]
Taylor Alatorre: Audrey Hobert writes and sings as if it’s impossible for members of her generation to ever have an unmediated experience of reality, which is not yet completely true but is an artistically compelling problem to labor under. “I listen to my playlists and pretend I’m you” is a short story premise packed into a few cartwheeling syllables, felt by the listener as another punchy data point in a cascade of curated vulnerability. And good luck trying to figure out whether she ever really was or thought of herself as “super cool”; she’s hiding behind seven proxies of herself. The biggest irony is that this performance of a frazzled and fractured identity is wedded to a structure of pristine pop formalism which lays bare Hobert’s trueest persona of all: the one who’s most put-together when articulating just how un-put-together she is. The belated sax solo is the final joke that this self-styled clown plays on herself, a sweet treat of catharsis which she knows her bedroom-pacing self has done nothing at all to deserve today. It tastes that much sweeter because of it.
[9]
Really, really glad to see this song got reviewed and to see all the interesting insights. I really loathe Gracie Abrams but always found the singles cowritten by Audrey Hobert had an interesting way of dealing with vocal rhythms and cadences, like Julia Michael’s writing taken to its extremes. A lot of Who’s the Clown (and Thirst Trap in particular) pairs this often infectious delivery with an actually interesting and thought out angle and stronger hooks. This somehow ended up as one of my most played songs of the year. If she could start working with more interesting producers she could literally drop an amazing project in my opinion – this one is quite spotless and serviceable, kind of reminds me of a lesser version of what Carly Rae Jepsen was going for on some of the tracks on Emotion, but it’s not quite there yet.
I’d never heard her before today, but after listening to this song and “Sue Me”, I can’t say I’m terribly impressed. There’s just nothing about her that is substantially different from any other female pop singer of today. Also, this song reminds me just how depressing it is that the last 20 years have been many people’s childhoods, which is maybe why I can’t relate. [6]