Rostam has shared Hardy, a new Clairo collaboration from his upcoming album American Stories. The record is out May 15 via Matsor Projects and Secretly Distribution, and this one carries the pleasant charge of two artists returning to a shared frequency without trying to recreate the exact weather of the last time they worked together.
That history matters here. Rostam produced Clairo’s 2019 debut album Immunity, the record that turned her bedroom-pop intimacy into something warmer, stranger, and more fully arranged. Their best-known shared moment from that era is Bags, still one of the decade’s cleanest examples of indie-pop restraint doing more emotional work than maximalism ever could. Hardy does not chase that song’s shadow, but it understands why the pairing worked: Rostam builds delicate architecture, and Clairo can make a small melodic turn feel like a room changing temperature.
The song has a long tail. Northern Transmissions reports that Rostam first created the instrumental in 2012, using a sample from Georges Delerue’s score for François Truffaut’s Day for Night. A François Hardy drum sample was part of the early version but did not make the finished track, though it did leave the song with its title. The final recording adds cello by Hamilton Berry, bass clarinet by Henry Solomon, and piano from Rostam.
In press materials quoted by Pitchfork, Rostam calls Hardy “a song about looking forward and looking back,” adding, “Ultimately, I hope it leaves you with some feeling of hope for the future. I’m so happy Claire could make a guest appearance and sing her own section of the song—I have always loved the way her voice communicates optimism.” That is exactly the lane the track occupies: reflective but not embalmed, nostalgic but not stuck.
The Antony Muse-directed video arrives ahead of American Stories: A Concert Film, an eight-song live performance with Rostam’s six-piece band shot at Sound City Studio A. The film premieres on YouTube on May 14, one day before American Stories lands. Rostam also has North American dates beginning May 27 in San Diego, followed by European shows in September.
Hardy is not the loudest way to announce release week, but that is the point. It is a soft launch in the best sense: patient, textured, and quietly confident that a small reunion can carry real emotional weight if the arrangement leaves enough air around it.