Vulnerability is the only thing that keeps us from disappearing into the noise
It’s hard to write about an artist from Los Angeles without acknowledging the city’s unrest, but Natalie Claro didn’t write “Spiders” in response to any of it. That’s what makes the track so eerily fitting. Written well before recent events, it now lands as a strangely prophetic piece of work. This isn’t protest music in any traditional sense. It’s something slower, more uncomfortable. A meditation on casual cruelty and emotional numbness. It began with a moment most people wouldn’t think twice about: someone stepping on a beetle for no reason. “It wasn’t about the bug,” Claro says. “It was about the act.” That detail stayed with her, and from it, a song took shape.
“Spiders” is less concerned with spectacle than with sensation. It doesn’t aim to shock, but to unsettle. Built around theatrical vocal layers, cinematic instrumentation and a deliberate pacing, the track conjures a kind of slow dread. Not the kind that erupts, but the kind that seeps in over time. Its strength lies in restraint. Claro doesn’t explode with anger. She watches, documents, and lets the smallest act of violence bloom into something much larger. She’s not making a grand statement. She’s showing you what apathy looks like, and asking why it’s become so easy to overlook.
What’s striking is how she frames vulnerability not as fragility, but as resistance. “People think vulnerability is weakness,” she says. “But it’s the only thing that keeps us from disappearing into the noise.” That’s the engine behind “Spiders”, not the fear of getting hurt, but the fear of becoming someone who no longer reacts. Someone who doesn’t flinch. In a culture that rewards detachment and efficiency, Claro chooses to slow down and feel everything. The discomfort in her music is intentional. It asks for attention, not approval.
Claro writes, produces and performs all her own material. She’s been described as genre-defying, but she’s less interested in escaping labels than in avoiding dilution. Her previous tracks like “Dizzy”, “Nightmare”, and “Reasons I Can’t Sleep” all orbit similar emotional territory, unease, grief, and refusal, but “Spiders” pushes things further inward. The theatricality is still there, but it never becomes artifice. Her voice doesn’t sound like it’s playing a character. It sounds like someone who’s just barely keeping it together, and doing so with purpose. Where others seek clarity, she holds onto ambiguity.
Though she was born in LA, Claro has lived most of her creative life on the move. Four years of touring, small shows, constant reinvention. She recently returned to LA, but there’s still a sense of transience in her music—something not quite grounded. Not because it’s lost, but because it refuses to settle. Her songs don’t reach for comfort or resolution. They hover in the space between reaction and reflection, where the tension never really breaks. That’s true of “Spiders” too. It ends unresolved, the echo of that first disturbing moment still hanging in the air.