There is a particular cruelty in the word other.
It sounds almost neutral: a way of distinguishing this from that, one group from another. But put it in the hands of a politician, newspaper proprietor or campaign strategist and it becomes something considerably more dangerous.
The other is the person who doesn't quite belong. The person to fear, blame or remove. The person whose rights can be discussed as though they were an abstract policy problem rather than an essential part of a human life.
On her new single, That Other, Teesside singer, songwriter and producer That Clare takes that language back.
The result is an urgent piece of synth-driven punk: part protest song, part warning and part refusal to disappear. Beneath its dark electronic pulse is a strikingly simple assertion - not only “I am that other”, but “You are enough”.
I think it's important to remember; we can all be 'other'.
Released on Friday 25 September, the track is the third to emerge from Clare’s debut album, Social Konstrukt. It arrives accompanied by a film featuring photographer and Hexham Pride organiser Alice Skye, alongside political commentator and performance artist Mark McGowan, better known to many online as The Artist Taxi Driver.
Yet the project’s most important presence remains Clare herself: a transgender artist from Teesside making music about the political forces that seek to define people from a distance.
The single’s artwork depicts the street sign for Tufton Street in Westminster.
It's not an accidental choice. The address - particularly number 55 - has become associated with a network of right-wing think tanks and campaigning organisations seeking to influence British political debate.
Some of those organisations have faced sustained questions about the transparency of their funding and the access they enjoy to those in power. Their offices sit only a short distance from Parliament, but the consequences of the ideas developed and promoted there travel much further.
They reach communities where public services are already stretched, where economic insecurity is commonplace and where anger can be redirected towards whichever minority has most recently been selected as the national problem.
In That Other, Clare’s target isn't disagreement itself. It's the deliberate production of division: the familiar political trick of persuading people with little power that somebody with even less power is responsible for their circumstances.
The song belongs to a long tradition of musicians refusing to treat politics as something happening elsewhere. Its influences move through punk, new wave, darkwave and electronic music, with echoes of artists including Nine Inch Nails, Suicide and Television.
But this isn't an exercise in musical nostalgia. Its subject is painfully current.
Marginalised people are too often spoken about rather than listened to. Their identities are transformed into headlines, polling questions and opportunities for political positioning. Complexity is flattened. Individual lives become symbols in arguments conducted by people who will never experience their consequences.
Clare answers that process with noise, repetition and presence.
The track and its accompanying film were written, produced and recorded by Clare at home.
That independence is critical. In an industry where access to studios, experienced producers and professional development remains uneven, the ability to build work outside traditional centres of power is both a creative decision and a practical necessity.
Clare’s development has also been supported by a northern music infrastructure that rarely receives the public recognition it deserves.
In 2025, she undertook a PRS Foundation-supported residency with Tees Music Alliance at Green Dragon Studios in Stockton. The organisation operates venues, recording facilities and artist-development programmes intended to sustain and strengthen music in the Tees Valley.
She's now developing her production and engineering practice through work with Come Play With Me in Leeds and producer Eve Horne’s Unheard Academy.
These organisations form part of the often-invisible scaffolding beneath our northern culture. They provide equipment, knowledge, space, confidence and networks. More importantly, they allow artists to develop without first having to leave the places that shaped them.
For Clare, those roots are in Teesside.
Her music draws on the energy of punk and the possibilities of electronic production, while addressing democracy, equality, trans and queer rights, and social justice. Among the artists she cites as influences are Laura Jane Grace, Blondie, Patti Smith and Depeche Mode - musicians for who style and substance have never needed to be separate things.
That combination is apparent throughout That Other. Its political argument isn't delivered as a lecture appended to the music. It lives inside the sound: tense, abrasive and deliberately insistent.
There's a risk in responding to dehumanising politics that the people targeted are forced continually to explain or defend their existence.
That Other attempts something different.
Its central refrain - “You are enough” - moves the song beyond a description of hostility. It becomes an act of recognition, addressed to anybody who's been told that they are strange, suspect, excessive or unwelcome.
Solidarity isn't the suggestion that everybody is the same. It's the understanding that difference mustn't be used as permission for cruelty.
The people encouraged to mistrust one another often have far more in common than the powerful interests encouraging that mistrust. They use the same public services, encounter the same insecure work and housing, and live with the consequences of decisions made elsewhere. Division succeeds when those shared experiences are obscured.
Art can't dismantle that machinery alone. It can, however, reveal how it works. It can give people language for what they are experiencing. And sometimes it can produce a sound loud enough to interrupt the argument.
From a home studio on Teesside, Clare has created a record that looks directly towards Westminster - but refuses to accept Westminster’s definition of who matters.
The word other was intended to mark a boundary.
Here, it becomes a point of connection.
That Other by That Clare is released on Friday 25 September 2026 through major streaming platforms and Bandcamp.
