Grouper’s ‘Clearing,’ Avoidant Attachment Style, and Why ‘It’s Safer Just to Be Alone’

The 2018 ambient track provides a tender, unvarnished view of the avoidant attachment style — specifically, how someone avoidant exchanges intimacy for safety despite the sadness it entails.

By Zachary Bolash

Photo courtesy of Pitchfork

Art tells romance grandly: dragonslayers courting princesses, Rachel getting off the plane, or Stevie Nicks staring daggers at Lindsey Buckingham during their 1997 performance of “Silver Springs.” This grandness, as Stevie Nicks’ glare implies, finds its way into music: Tyler, the Creator’s soulful IGOR centers around an impassioned bisexual love triangle, and Lily Allen’s West Side Girl is an act of extramarital warfare against her then-husband. Few musicians, however, explore love through the less impassioned yet arguably more depressing lens of an avoidant attachment style. Love fails not because of treachery or because two people find themselves passionately incompatible, but because love makes that person feel unsafe.

Psychologists define avoidant attachment style by hyper-independence, emotional dissociation, and a preference for superficial bonds. Armchair therapists often mischaracterize this attachment style as a selfish or narcissistic impulse. This interpretation, however, treats the avoidant attachment style as a personal preference when, in reality, it is a neurological survival mechanism in response to past trauma. When hurt by someone they loved, the avoidant’s brain rewires to become, in a sense, allergic to intimacy. Grouper (Liz Harris)’s 2018 ambient pop track, “Clearing,” captures the avoidant attachment style: it represents not a preference for oneself, but the result of traumas that simply cause one, as Harris states, to feel safer “just being alone.”

The track’s instrumental symbolizes this safety in solitude. The airy piano chords travel freely throughout the song, reverberating off the studio’s walls. The vocals fade out into a soft fuzz reminiscent of tides collapsing onto shores, fizzling into streams of salivic bubbles. These instrumental choices evoke solitary images of an expansive echo chamber or a barren shore. Through these reclusive images, the listener understands this is not a love song but a song about love, a treatise to help the artist understand her own love.

The first verse, “Open up the window / Try to let the light out / Try to let the curtain float in / That way I can hear the water,” places us in Harris’ lonesome head. The Mrs. Dalloway-like narration of her morning routine floats listeners along in the stream of her consciousness, carrying them into another part of her day: “Pulling on a pathway / Calling on the pathway / Whispering and passing / Shoes rattle, and I was thinking I was running.” Alongside the description of her menial routines, the instrumental situates the avoidant's mental state: a space of peaceful yet melancholy loneliness.

However, encountering her ex-lover disrupts this state. In seeing them, Harris croons, “Every time I see you / I have to pretend I don't / You thought that it would help / But it's only made us fall apart.” The memory of this person thrusts her into a volatile headspace, as Harris describes in the following verse, “I'm treading in the water / Human in the shadows.” Drowning—her “[wading] in the water”—and stalking—her noting a “human in the shadow”—now describe her headspace, contrasting earlier images of opening windows and walking along trails.

These dueling images show how avoidants process trauma. Harris finds peace alone, but in the “shadow” of an ex-lover, she becomes distressed. Meaning, inferably, Harris’ aloneness shields her from the traumas of past love. Traumas that specifically surround a break-up are present in the lines, “Sometimes I wish / That none of this had happened / Let our sad song / Be carried out to sea.” 

At the song’s end, Grouper draws upon these experiences to justify her preference for solitude. That, in light of her romantic travails, being intimate invites danger— specifically experiencing the psychic fallout of romantic trauma. In sum, “Clearing” manifests Harris’ avoidancy at the sight of a past lover, making her feel as though  she's “wading in water.” However, when alone, Grouper seems to exchange such dangers for solitary, somewhat melancholy routines bearing a sense of peace. Such an exchange is tenderly summed up in one of the track's final lyrics: “How can I explain / Why it's safer just to be alone?”