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ILLUMINATI HOTTIES
Power(Snack Shack Tracks / Hopeless Records)
Add date: 8.27.2024
Release date: 8.23.2024
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For two years, the problem wasn’t that Sarah Tudzin couldn’t write the songs that would eventually become Power, her winning fourth album as Illuminati Hotties. It’s just that she didn’t yet want to, that she wasn’t ready to unpack the luggage of her suddenly very weird life in three- minute bits. Power, however, was worth the wait.
To rewind: Just before Illuminati Hotties released 2020’s Free I.H—one of the best end-arounds for escaping record-label malfeasance in modern memory—she fell deeply in love, buoying her after a recent breakup that had seemed titanic. But that summer, her mother, Lisa, died from metastatic breast cancer just as her father recovered from a long illness. As Free I.H became vaunted as one of that upending year’s best surprises, Tudzin stepped away, into both her own grief and the comforting swells of new love. And then, for two years, she worked.
She finally toured 2021’s eruptive Let Me Do One More, the album she’d intended to release before that label snafu forced an audible. As an in-demand producer and engineer, she toiled on a string of others’ records: boygenius, Weyes Blood, Speedy Ortiz, Cloud Nothings, and on and on. Rather than confront her own feelings, Tudzin burrowed into someone else’s for those two years.
But sometime in 2022, Tudzin, a perennial early riser, started grabbing a guitar or sitting at a keyboard each morning before heading off to make someone else’s music. She just wrote, trying to capture snatches of melody, poignant images, or playful lines before her producer brain kicked in for the day. She wanted to capture what would come when she just started singing or playing, a daily practice she maintained for months. Eventually, she had enough snippets to decamp to a rented little place in Joshua Tree with her dog, Maeby; in three-and-a-half days, she finished seven songs. Before long, or at least before Death Cab for Cutie’s Jason McGerr joined Tudzin in a Washington state suburb to track drums for three days in April 2023, the tally had reached 28.
Tudzin was at least beginning to unpack life’s insane roller-coaster, beginning to turn it into new Illuminati Hotties songs she could sing and share. Power is not a grief record. It is not a love record, either. Instead, it is a real-life record, a reflection of all the things Tudzin has endured or enjoyed during the too-long span since Illuminati Hotties’ wonderfully infectious last batch.
Sadness, joy, and the busyness of modern existence are all bound into these 13 songs, characters and circumstances sometimes exaggerated not just for effect but to offer a modest buffer between Tudzin’s world and those inside of her words.
Opener “Can’t Be Still” is a side-eyed anthem of those early risers, Tudzin praising the business lunch and the efficacy of Adderall over drums dancing in restless delight. Its successor, “I Would Like, Still Love You” is a purposefully hyperbolic ode to enchantment, the kind of blind infatuation that lets one overlook, say, a knifed tire or unwarranted gossip in order to stay close.
And the brief closer, an unplugged power ballad called “Everything Changes,” reckons with the paralyzing consequences of grief, the way its depression seems to wield an iron claw.
True to Tudzin’s last four years, Power folds a lot of life inside 37 minutes. After that first session in Washington, Tudzin reconvened in Los Angeles with John Congleton, the rightfully acclaimed producer who has become a mentor of sorts. They drilled down on these songs, questioning the existence of each layer and choice, asking if every element really needed to remain. The end result of such inquiry is a record that sounds wonderfully effortless, the delightful chaos of Illuminati Hotties’ past streamlined into efficient tunes where nothing is extraneous. There’s the Fountains of Wayne drive of “Falling in Love With Somebody Better,” a backward-waving taunt that delivers a flirt, wink, and fuck-off to an ex in less than three minutes. True to Tudzin’s recent life, though, a sadness lurks beneath the esprit. When she sings “I wish that you had met her,” she’s lamenting the way her partner will never meet her mom.
“What’s the Fuzz,” meanwhile, cakes its lines in curls of sculpted noise, setting up a hook that catches with all the barbed charm of The Breeders. And there’s the lambent sadness of the title track, where neon keyboards and multitrack strums and strings invoke the drift of loss. But late-arriving drums afford momentum, framing an aspirational trajectory that lets Tudzin croon “I want to be where you are/I want to feel your power” like a new life mantra. These songs waste nothing, their meticulous arrangements foregrounding not only Tudzin’s melodic magnetism but also the experiences through which she’s wading.
By her own admission, Tudzin is something of a busy body, a hard worker who likes to commit fully to any project she pursues and sees relaxing too much as a waste of limited time. Early into writing Power, she spent a weekend with her friends, working up a few numbers in a California cabin around the mountainous Big Bear Lake. When the time came to leave the idyllic escape, she was all packed, ready to head back home to Los Angeles for the next job. But those pals, including her partner, convinced her to wait a while, to play around with a few more ideas as morning traffic dissipated. She relented; moments later, they had “Sleeping In,” a perfect pop tune and soundtrack to falling into love’s blissful compromise. It is the sort of thing Tudzin says she’s always wanted to sing, its sprightly groove and mesmerizing hook as suited for ’60s soul as post-millennial pop. Tudzin finally took the time to write it, just as she did with Power—a record that transmutes the unshakable hardships and wonders of life into a fetching set of inescapable songs.
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Hopeless Records
Snack Shack Tracks
Spotify
Tidal
TikTok
YouTube
For two years, the problem wasn’t that Sarah Tudzin couldn’t write the songs that would eventually become Power, her winning fourth album as Illuminati Hotties. It’s just that she didn’t yet want to, that she wasn’t ready to unpack the luggage of her suddenly very weird life in three- minute bits. Power, however, was worth the wait.
To rewind: Just before Illuminati Hotties released 2020’s Free I.H—one of the best end-arounds for escaping record-label malfeasance in modern memory—she fell deeply in love, buoying her after a recent breakup that had seemed titanic. But that summer, her mother, Lisa, died from metastatic breast cancer just as her father recovered from a long illness. As Free I.H became vaunted as one of that upending year’s best surprises, Tudzin stepped away, into both her own grief and the comforting swells of new love. And then, for two years, she worked.
She finally toured 2021’s eruptive Let Me Do One More, the album she’d intended to release before that label snafu forced an audible. As an in-demand producer and engineer, she toiled on a string of others’ records: boygenius, Weyes Blood, Speedy Ortiz, Cloud Nothings, and on and on. Rather than confront her own feelings, Tudzin burrowed into someone else’s for those two years.
But sometime in 2022, Tudzin, a perennial early riser, started grabbing a guitar or sitting at a keyboard each morning before heading off to make someone else’s music. She just wrote, trying to capture snatches of melody, poignant images, or playful lines before her producer brain kicked in for the day. She wanted to capture what would come when she just started singing or playing, a daily practice she maintained for months. Eventually, she had enough snippets to decamp to a rented little place in Joshua Tree with her dog, Maeby; in three-and-a-half days, she finished seven songs. Before long, or at least before Death Cab for Cutie’s Jason McGerr joined Tudzin in a Washington state suburb to track drums for three days in April 2023, the tally had reached 28.
Tudzin was at least beginning to unpack life’s insane roller-coaster, beginning to turn it into new Illuminati Hotties songs she could sing and share. Power is not a grief record. It is not a love record, either. Instead, it is a real-life record, a reflection of all the things Tudzin has endured or enjoyed during the too-long span since Illuminati Hotties’ wonderfully infectious last batch.
Sadness, joy, and the busyness of modern existence are all bound into these 13 songs, characters and circumstances sometimes exaggerated not just for effect but to offer a modest buffer between Tudzin’s world and those inside of her words.
Opener “Can’t Be Still” is a side-eyed anthem of those early risers, Tudzin praising the business lunch and the efficacy of Adderall over drums dancing in restless delight. Its successor, “I Would Like, Still Love You” is a purposefully hyperbolic ode to enchantment, the kind of blind infatuation that lets one overlook, say, a knifed tire or unwarranted gossip in order to stay close.
And the brief closer, an unplugged power ballad called “Everything Changes,” reckons with the paralyzing consequences of grief, the way its depression seems to wield an iron claw.
True to Tudzin’s last four years, Power folds a lot of life inside 37 minutes. After that first session in Washington, Tudzin reconvened in Los Angeles with John Congleton, the rightfully acclaimed producer who has become a mentor of sorts. They drilled down on these songs, questioning the existence of each layer and choice, asking if every element really needed to remain. The end result of such inquiry is a record that sounds wonderfully effortless, the delightful chaos of Illuminati Hotties’ past streamlined into efficient tunes where nothing is extraneous. There’s the Fountains of Wayne drive of “Falling in Love With Somebody Better,” a backward-waving taunt that delivers a flirt, wink, and fuck-off to an ex in less than three minutes. True to Tudzin’s recent life, though, a sadness lurks beneath the esprit. When she sings “I wish that you had met her,” she’s lamenting the way her partner will never meet her mom.
“What’s the Fuzz,” meanwhile, cakes its lines in curls of sculpted noise, setting up a hook that catches with all the barbed charm of The Breeders. And there’s the lambent sadness of the title track, where neon keyboards and multitrack strums and strings invoke the drift of loss. But late-arriving drums afford momentum, framing an aspirational trajectory that lets Tudzin croon “I want to be where you are/I want to feel your power” like a new life mantra. These songs waste nothing, their meticulous arrangements foregrounding not only Tudzin’s melodic magnetism but also the experiences through which she’s wading.
By her own admission, Tudzin is something of a busy body, a hard worker who likes to commit fully to any project she pursues and sees relaxing too much as a waste of limited time. Early into writing Power, she spent a weekend with her friends, working up a few numbers in a California cabin around the mountainous Big Bear Lake. When the time came to leave the idyllic escape, she was all packed, ready to head back home to Los Angeles for the next job. But those pals, including her partner, convinced her to wait a while, to play around with a few more ideas as morning traffic dissipated. She relented; moments later, they had “Sleeping In,” a perfect pop tune and soundtrack to falling into love’s blissful compromise. It is the sort of thing Tudzin says she’s always wanted to sing, its sprightly groove and mesmerizing hook as suited for ’60s soul as post-millennial pop. Tudzin finally took the time to write it, just as she did with Power—a record that transmutes the unshakable hardships and wonders of life into a fetching set of inescapable songs.