Claud has a new dog, an 8-month-old rescue that refuses to leave their arms. It's the latest in a string of grown-up moves that now sees Claud living in a New York City apartment, in a romantic relationship, and fully at ease with who they are and the music they make.

This profound happiness is the bedrock of their wonderfully whimsical third album, 'Me and the Music', an airy, lofty record that sparkles with a sense of fairytale escapism. For Claud, a queer, non-binary person living in Trump's America, the album represented a world away from the one they find themselves begrudgingly living through.

"The whole album is love songs and being like, 'Oh, I'm the twenty-something queer person living in New York in a happy relationship'," Claud explains.

"I always thought that was ten years away. When I was in high school, my friends' older siblings were that person, but now I have my own apartment and my own dog. But I think so much. I think about politics all the time because I hate it here. The government are just damaging and making everything worse. I'm surprised it didn't bleed into more songs on the album, but for me, music is an escape. I know that on the days I wrote these songs, I was desperate to think about anything else, so it was nice to escape into a love song or a hate song."

The only song that doesn't follow that pattern is lead single 'She Doesn't Love Me', a tongue-in-cheek song that sees Claud 'bitch to the boys at the bar' about their situationship. While admitting that the track "was a bit of a fake out" tonally – a more grounded, earthy soundscape with gang vocals featuring Dork alumnus Annie DiRusso – it is nonetheless representative of the community that Claud built around them when forming this new record.