Audrey Hobert, 26, came up with the opening song for her debut album while watching a Steve Martin documentary at home on a Friday night.
Hobert was attempting to determine her next course of action after she and her childhood friend, Gracie Abrams, finished writing a few songs, several of which would go on to become hits on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart and make Abrams a Gen Z pop sensation. The Nickelodeon comedy series The Really Loud House, which follows a preteen boy as he navigates life with ten sisters, featured her as a staff writer for two seasons. Although the songwriting experience had been novel and thrilling, Hobert did not yet regard herself as an artist. Then she switched on the two-part documentary docSTEVE! (Martin) on Apple TV+ and was inspired by the comic she had seen as a child, who wore a white suit and played a banjo.
“I noticed that his whole career and life fell into place once he decided to just be himself on stage completely,” Hobert told NPR. I then grabbed my banjo guitar. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do at the moment, so I began composing a one-woman show. I thought, ‘How would I launch my one woman show?’ and so I began creating the song.
The resulting song, “I Like To Touch People,” is a humorous and whimsical song about striking up a conversation at a party, having a people-pleasing mother, and, well, touching people—both literally and symbolically, perhaps. It establishes the mood for the bubblegum pop album Who’s the Clown?, which features humorous yet vulnerable lyrics that instantly make Hobert a lovable narrator. In one tune, she says, “I’m taking thirst traps in the mirror in my room,” over a relentlessly cheerful rhythm. “I think I look bad, so I take a hundred.”
Who’s the Clown? Overwheatus-like drum machines and guitars.released by RCA Records on August 15 and produced by Ricky Gourmet, a newbie who doubles as a Finneas protégé, makes Hobert a unique new pop voice. It sounds more like an uncensored voice memo from your most upbeat friend (even after she’s just had the worst day of her life) than the kind of stuff you’d find on a major label release. In “Don’t Go Back to His Ass,” Hobert uses folk harmonies to give advice on how to avoid a toxic lover. In “Chateau,” she takes psychedelic mushrooms in small amounts before attending an industry party where everyone is trying too hard to be hip, which Hobert instantly interprets as being uninteresting. The music video for “Wet Hair,” a careless song about meeting up with an ex before having a blowout to show a point, has the do-it-yourself feel of something a tween would create on the family computer when she was left home alone in middle school.
When Hobert calls from the same kitchen where she lipsyncs with a wooden spoon for the “Wet Hair” video, she says, “I think what I really want to do more than anything is make an audience laugh,” over Zoom. “I do approach everything in the world with a sense of comedy at its core. It seems to me like a survival tactic. Additionally, I believe it’s a more enjoyable way to be and live.
Many of Hobert’s contemporary pop peers, including Sabrina, Chapell, Olivia, and Rene, share that opinion.However, Audrey’s humor has a decidedly and deliciously grounded air. Although she is a dancer and theater enthusiast who was raised by a sitcom writer, her style is more direct and less refined than those of her theatrical and Disney-trained peers. The brutal honesty with which she overshares with everyone who will listen—whether it be a buddy, an Uber driver, God, or the way she manages to fit so many words and emotions into a line—is frequently the joke’s butt. It frequently feels like you’re playing catch-up as a listener, laughing a beat behind her as she moves on to her next revelation. Hobert has the quirky, confident charm of someone who hasn’t been instructed on how to meticulously curate a commercial brand or image. Her off-screen sensibility (she studied screenwriting at New York University) led her to choose to pose for her debut album cover wearing Dansko clogs and slightly mismatched socks.
However, she acknowledges that it initially took her a while to realize she had a pop album in her. She had been working on a Nickelodeon show, but it was cancelled. She signed a publishing agreement as a result of her partnership with Abrams, which Hobert characterizes as “something fun to do with my best friend.” She tried writing lyrics for other people for months, working with musicians and producers. It simply wasn’t functioning.
“I have a lot of respect for songwriters who can write a great song with anyone. That’s not my style as a writer,” Hobert declares. “I think that’s why it worked so well with Gracie was because we knew each other so well and the context was all there.”
They collaborated on songs like “I Love You, I’m Sorry,” for which Hobert also directed the music video, and “That’s So True,” Abrams’ biggest hit to date. Some of Abrams’ funniest lyrics to date may be heard on both of these songs. While working with Hobert, Abrams claimed that he frequently encouraged her to “scream the first thing that comes to mind” in a VEVO short clip on the creation of her album, The Secret of Us. “This is a good example of [your] best friend enabling you to have complete freedom and space to say anything that comes to mind,” Abrams stated.
Writing alone, Hobert pushed herself to the limit with that approach, producing songs she believed were largely too intimate for an outsider to perform (although for a while she considered Halsey could be capable). She eventually admitted to her publisher that she had composed songs that she intended to record as an album. She asked Gourmet, with whom she had a genuine relationship and who had been doing the session circuit similarly, to do it with her.
The single “Sue Me” made a big impression in May, and the music video, which was self-directed, included a montage of Hobert dancing wildly both by herself and with Gourmet as a clown ignored them from a corner. With over 23 million Spotify plays to date, the early Kesha-style confessional about hooking up with an ex who looks fantastic in his Amazon Basics went viral. Hobert sold out performances in Los Angeles, London, and New York City in a flash. Her hyperspecific lyrics and dance-like, no-one-is-watching style captivated listeners.
However, who is the clown?isn’t just lighthearted jokes. In tracks like “Sex and the City” and “Phoebe,” Hobert transforms sardonic pop culture allusions into heartfelt reflection. She penned the latter as she was first watching Friends. She claims that she instantly related to Lisa Kudrow’s character Phoebe Buffay, who provides a lot of the comedic relief in the series. However, she points out that among the group of friends, Phoebe is the only one who has not been courted romantically.
“Why aren’t any of those three potential partners interested in dating her? “I don’t understand it,” Hobert says. And I’ve always had a slight sense of that. For the majority of my life, I didn’t feel physically worthy or particularly beautiful, so I really wanted to compose a song about that. I was able to relate it to that persona.
In the song, she grapples with insecurity until she can own her beauty. “Cause why else would you want me? I think I’ve got a f***** up face,” Hobert sings. “And that thought used to haunt me, ’til I fell in its sweet embrace.”
(Phoebe, for the record, ends up marrying a charming character played by universal heartthrob Paul Rudd Hobert hasn’t made it that far into the show yet.)
At a time when young women are constantly being marketed as “tomato girl,” “clean girl,” and “Pilates princess” by social media platforms like TikTok, Hobert offers something different: a sense of cool that comes only from being who you are, even when it’s messy, confusing, and perhaps a little embarrassing. Her press photos, for example, include a shot of her on her hands and knees outside Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre. To launch her website, she posted a photo on Instagram wearing a fedora and holding a wooden pipe. Her online presence feels intentionally cringe and avant-garde at once, blurring the line between what’s a bit and what’s sincere. It feels less like marketing and more like an artist who knows she’s fun and sexy even when she’s wearing sensible shoes. She gets called “quirky” in a lot of label meetings, she says, and she’s fine with that.
Hobert gasps when asked if she considers her run of humorous performances to be subversive, a la Pee-wee Herman. She then displays the background on her phone, which is a picture of Pee-wee, the fictional children’s TV character that Paul Reubens created for the Los Angeles improv group The Groundlings. “Performance art is the most interesting thing to me, honestly,” Hobert says. “To be completely earnest and to also maybe make people have a hard time telling if you’re being serious or not.”
Who’s the Clown?is a one-woman show of sorts, a peek into Hobert’s colorful, wacky world. But it’s just a taste of what’s to come. When asked if writing for television is now on the backburner, Hobert doesn’t hesitate.
“I plan to do it all. Right now, this is my whole entire life songwriting and this album. Every fiber of my being is this right now,” she says. “But I feel like I love television and I love movies equally. And theater, oh my God. Theater specifically! I have big, big aspirations. And I plan to do it all.”
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