illuminati hotties: A Reclamation of Power Worth Rooting For
Sarah Tudzin talks surrendering to loss in her songwriting, the preciousness of "going soft," and weaving a tapestry of grief, love and closure on her latest album, POWER.
Photo by Shervin Lainez
Though the last four years have been rather unprecedented for Sarah Tudzin, the last 18 months have been a particularly unquantifiable (but much-needed) exhale. In July 2020, on the night before she was set to release Free I.H: This is Not the One You’ve Been Waiting For—a mixtape she assembled in response to her band buying out their contract with their former label, Tiny Engines, after a violation and negotiation of royalties—Tudzin’s mom passed away from cancer. 16 months later, Tudzin produced Pom Pom Squad’s Death of a Cheerleader and illuminati hotties unveiled Let Me Do One More, a wall of noisy, chameleonic rippers that garnered deserved widespread acclaim and still, to no one’s surprise, holds up. Since Let Me Do One More came out, Tudzin has kept herself busy by eloping with her partner Maddie Ross and having a finger on the dial in the studio with acts like the Armed, Speedy Ortiz, Eliza McLamb and boygenius, the latter of which garnered her a Best Alternative Music Album award at the Grammys in February 2024.
Last year, as Paste was doing sporadic, Grammy-centric coverage, I did a long Q&A with Sarah Tudzin the producer, with the understanding that writing about Sarah Tudzin the illuminati hotties mastermind would come sometime later. Years ago, before releasing Kiss Yr Frenemies, Tudzin earned engineering and mixing credits on Slowdive’s comeback album and the Hamilton soundtrack. They were rewards for decamping to Berklee and learning the ropes, and her return to SoCal yielded a gig shadowing one of the greatest living mixers: Chris Coady. After helping engineer Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising and Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres, I was certain that my next conversation with Tudzin would be in the wake of a Grammy victory. My assumptions were correct.
It’s easy to look at Tudzin’s work in illuminati hotties and consider the scope of her career through that lens only, but her winning a Grammy last year is no fluke: She’s earned the trust of so many people in the industry that, yes, of course she was asked to lend a hand to an award-winning album. “Not only is it a stamp of approval on my work, but it’s a level of friendship that I feel really lucky that these people want to trust me with, with art that’s so special to them and that they were trying to do the most with,” Tudzin says. “And they did it and I love that.”
Fast-forward to August 2024, and Tudzin and I are seated at a table in the basement of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The third illuminati hotties album, POWER, has been out for 24 hours, and she’ll be performing a solo set in celebration of Hopeless Records unveiling a massive exhibit at the museum for their 30th anniversary. If you walk around the main artifacts room downstairs, you’re going to stumble upon the very same cropped work shirt that Tudzin wears on the POWER cover, which is now permanently homed in a display case in Cleveland, Ohio. Hopeless effectively rescued Tudzin and her band after they were orphaned in the wake of the Tiny Engines controversy, and Let Me Do One More and POWER are two of the strongest rock records of this decade—no doubt a result of one of the most essential independent labels giving one of indie’s greatest minds the resources needed to cut brilliant albums. It’s amazing how far a little faith can still go in 2024.
Let Me Do One More is still a Top 10 record of the 2020s for me especially, as songs like “u v v p,” “Toasting” and “Mmmoooaaaaayaya” still go Platinum in my household. It’s an album that, for Tudzin, lost its spark after she was forced to tighten the gap on her own proximity to trauma. She was getting write-ups in Rolling Stone and SPIN and “Pool Hopping” went to #1 on college radio charts, but an extreme sense of loss and gloom washed over the album cycle. Gratitude was still felt, but celebrations were few and far between. Without her mom, Tudzin’s magic and sense of purpose evaporated. But there was a sense, at least from my perspective as a listener who’d barely written any music criticism at all, that wherever illuminati hotties went next would be contoured by the room in Tudzin’s heart that her mom’s passing left vacant.
But last summer, illuminati hotties returned with the one-off single “Truck,” which was Tudzin’s earnest attempt at channeling the cruising guitars of Pavement while waxing poetic on mortality through a motivating kindness that is resolute in its assurance to keep going. In her own words, it was “a new era, but it wasn’t the era that POWER ended up being.” “‘Truck’ was a bit of an experiment and cosplay,” she continues. “I put a little bait on the hook to see if, honestly, a woman doing that thing would catch the attention of the people who are seemingly enthralled with men doing that thing.” What was the feedback Tudzin received for it? “I love the song, and I love playing it as a part of the live set,” she says. “It felt successful to me because I wanted it to feel that way, and it did in the recorded project. There’s other people who make music like that, where it goes a further distance, but I was happy to just have this as a single.”
Instead, POWER became a soundscape of softness enraptured by well-timed outbursts. The yelps she bellowed on “Pool Hopping” three years ago are traded in for volume knobs turned farther to the left. A song like “Falling in Love With Someone Better” is resounding in its fluctuating velocity, as Tudzin cushions the “she’s pulling each word out of me like a splinter” line with an arrangement that articulates its own gentleness before skyscraping into an engine powered by sorrow waltzing with beautiful, doting gestures of love. “It’s so easy to shout into a microphone and get a reaction immediately,” Tudzin says. “What’s really exciting about a more laid back approach to writing is you have to figure out how to bring people toward you in a new way. You can’t just scream in their faces and get them hyped. You have to whisper and get them to come a little closer so they can hear it. I do think that, even with the slower burns on the record, the goal was to be loud in a way that indie rock used to be. Even if it was intimate, the vocals are close to your face and it’s loud in a way of perceived volume, as opposed to tenderness being equivalent to volume.”
POWER is a muscular, multi-dimensional title that can mean 100 things to 100 people. When you tap into the record, and you listen to songs like “Rot” or “You Are Not Who You Were” or “Can’t Be Still,” the energy that comes from that word takes a new shape through every tempo change and turn of phrase. “It was a theme that perpetually showed up over and over again in each of those songs,” Tudzin says. “Sometimes I was being oppressed by power. Sometimes it was me empowering myself and wielding my power. Sometimes it was celestial, how we feel the power of entropy around us. It’s something we all do every day—we negotiate with power between people, between bureaucracy and humanity.”
POWER also signifies the most time that’s ever passed between one of Tudzin’s projects, at least since Kiss Yr Frenemies came out in 2017. In a lot of ways the album feels like a renewal, like something shifted—not just cosmetically, but emotionally. “I was aiming for a wider scope,” Tudzin admits. “I love making punk rock, I love making little surfy, fun songs. But to me, I was aiming for a bigger target [on POWER]—a wider audience, a more accessible sound. I wanted to, obviously, give fans who love my band already music that they liked, but I also was like, ‘How can I expand this? What is the next level for us?’ It became a shifting point of ‘Where does this album land, and how am I going to execute that?’” She entered the POWER headspace with a few dozen songs—some of them demos, some finished, some just a verse and a chorus—after writing daily. For the 13 tracks that made the album, it was a matter of them getting to “the universe [they’re] supposed to be in.”
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