Towards the end of Leos Carax's 1991 film ‘Les Amants du Pont-Neuf’ (‘The Lovers on the Bridge’), its drifting protagonists, a struggling artist and a half-blind painter, careen down the Seine as the city explodes with fireworks, the destitute lovers briefly possessing all of Paris. “It got to me more than anything I’ve watched in years,” says Clara Mann, who watched it on a small laptop screen in the middle of making her second album, Wishbone. Carax’s vision of love was a construction where worlds could be rebuilt and seen from the position of two – physical exaltations pitched against despair, light against dark, beauty and ruin struck from the same flint – a vision the South London songwriter couldn’t shake. Where Mann’s 2025 debut album Rift sat in a single strange, isolated shade of blue, Wishbone is built instead on contrast: a record with a kind of luminosity running through it, the brightest passages made legible by shadow. From the very beginning of Wishbone, Mann found herself attempting something that had never come naturally to her. After the nostalgic introspection of Rift, she was determined to imagine good things for herself, and believe they might actually be within reach. It was, she says, a frightening decision – to picture a life that’s beautiful and allow herself to want it. Mann likens the wishbone image that gives the record its name to Marina Abramović's ‘Rest Energy’, the performance in which artist and partner hold a drawn bow and arrow between their bodies – a single gesture living in total trust and the possibility of ruin. It’s an emblem of love, but also of the larger wager the album keeps making; wanting good things, and letting other people want them for you, is worth the risk of the break. It’s a concept that’s never only romantic in Mann’s world – it stands for the whole precarious business of being held by anyone at all. Perhaps as a result of this intention, Mann’s voice has never sounded more assured than on these songs: a clear and distinct instrument that’s both guiding and guided, raw and guttural when needed, the pied piper to her own balladic intonations when not."Fortuna" was the first song written for the new album – a bridge between here and Rift – with its devastating opening couplet coming to terms with the distance to her old life: “Now that I only see colours, / I’ll forget your shape, / Blue is all I can remember, / Washed across your face.” And yet it’s shot through with joy, its loose, distant percussion drifting like a heartbeat heard through skin. Written after missing the last train home, riding two night buses through London in the early-December Christmas lights, it’s a lonely song but locked into the most vivid, magical moments of solitude. There’s a deliberate off centredness to it that ends up feeling perfectly centred, recalling the meandering cadence of Jolie Holland. “I felt very bare writing a lot of this album,”admits Mann. “I wasn’t interested in hiding behind the songs anymore, or being elusive or oblique. Throughout the record, there’s this sense of wanting to be witnessed, and recognised - and in order for those things to happen, you yourself have to be fully present, and willing to be seen. I wanted to live, and to write, from that feeling.