illuminati hotties: A Reclamation of Power Worth Rooting For

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.”

Trying to figure out whether POWER should have included a blend of newly-tinted curiosity and material that would have flourished on Let Me Do One More wasn’t a conversation Tudzin was having with herself. At the end of the day, POWER is Sarah Tudzin being Sarah Tudzin—if you don’t fuck with where she’s going, you never fucked with where she started. “I’m growing and changing, my taste is shifting over the course of years, so I want to make music that I love, no matter what anyone’s gonna say about it. I wanna make some shit where I’m like, ‘This is the best shit ever and I love it.’ In my dream scenario, all the people that love us come with me, even if they’re a Free I.H. head. Something I think the producer brain feeds is being a chameleon and serving each song the way that I feel is best. A song like ‘Rot,’ that was a hard song to write. If I have a song like that, it would be a disservice to me to produce it like an OG hotties, punk-poppy thing. I could have done that. I could have changed the tempo, sure, but it lived in this space where I was like, ‘It needs to feel like everything is dry and close and icky, like you’re a moth to the light.” So far, the reward has felt greater than ever before for Tudzin, because people are connecting with the material and either seeing themselves in what she was feeling or finding a new interpretation of their own.

On the morning of POWER’s release, Tudzin tweeted “i was raw on this album.” I ask her to expand on that, and she points to how bizarre it’s been doing press around the record. “I was being more honest than I ever had been,” she says. “I was talking about stuff that was really close to my heart, for positive reasons and negative reasons. It was stuff about my personal life that I was exposing in ways I hadn’t been so blunt about previously. Press starts to trickle out and people forget, sometimes, that there’s humans making the music. They’ll say ‘Pretty cool, but not the masterpiece that came out in 2021,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t really know if y’all were calling it a masterpiece in 2021 but cook, awesome.’ It’s hard to be vulnerable and to cut your stomach open, sit on the kitchen table and let everybody fool around in there. I was feeling myself for whatever was about to be perceived. If there is flack, it’s harder to take. If I’m making a fucking loud, random punk record where the words are chaotic or a guise for emotion, it’s easy to be like, ‘You don’t get it, whatever, I don’t care.’ But if somebody reads your diary and is like, ‘Eh,’ then you’re like, ‘Oh, man, that one kind of hurt.’”

That is the crux of press cycles, of course. Controlling the story around your album is impossible, as every interviewer and reviewer is going to digest it differently. Just because you won a gold-plated gramophone doesn’t mean you’re suddenly immune to anything but unquestionable praise. But with a record like POWER, which sees Tudzin writing about her mom and writing about her marriage and circumventing grief with an abundance of romance, you still want to be precious about it—even if you’ve long come to terms with your art no longer being yours once everyone else can access it. “You have to make peace with the fact that it’s gonna leave your orbit and other people are just gonna decide what it means to them, whether that’s true or not,” Tudzin says. “‘These are the songs I’m standing behind, this is the best shit that I feel like I’ve ever made and, if you don’t want to get on board, the train’s leaving’—that’s the only way I could think about it, to get beyond the preciousness of it all.”

What makes spending time with Tudzin so rewarding is that her process is as personal as it is formulaic—that’s the perk of being a player and a producer, after all. “You’re forced to be objective about your emotions and your subjectivity and your taste as an artist,” she says. “As a producer, you’re forced to be like, ‘How, objectively, am I going to make a record that is the most marketable in this way or reaches these people?’ Tudzin was fortunate to have John Congleton join her for a week, along with a swath of collaborators, like Cavetown, Ryan Hemsworth and Jon Joseph, who tapped in to write, play and record parts of POWER. It was such a reward for her that, whenever the need to make her next illuminati hotties album comes around, she might never attack it alone again. “I can see the validity in opening the door a little bit more,” she adds. “Maybe that’s in the future, maybe not. It’s so easy for me to go, as a producer, to another artist and be like, ‘If you want this to happen, then we’re going to do this.’ It’s harder to do that with yourself. Working with an artist is like reaching the end goal together in a way where the artist feels great and wants to stand behind what they did and you feel like you’re capturing the best version of that.”

Most of POWER was written at Tudzin’s home studio in Los Angeles but, when she found herself with an excess of songs and no visible edge lines to start cutting away at, she went to Joshua Tree, rented out an Airbnb for a few days and began writing and editing. “I was like, ‘I need a place where I can not be distracted by everything else going on,’” she says. “If I’m at home trying to work on hotties stuff and I get a text at noon that’s like, ‘We need stems for this album tomorrow,’ the day changes. But, by removing myself from distraction and from day-to-day business, it was easy to finally get to the meat of the record. ‘Falling in Love With Somebody Better’ came out of that, ‘Power’ came out of that.’ ‘You Are Not Who You Were,’ I finished up there. Once I gave myself room to breathe, the album started to come out.”

Tudzin considers herself to be attracted to a “desert climate lizard vibe,” and one can’t help but mythologize the music anyway, even if “Sleeping In” and “The L” don’t sound very Gram Parsons, cosmic country-ish. The climate makes its way into the music regardless, even if it’s only in a work-ethic sense. “I would open the front door and let my dog out, and you can just see for miles,” Tudzin explains. “There’s no other houses, there’s Joshua trees, mountains, cacti and flat land. It really puts your brain in a space of ‘There is nothing better to do than write these songs right now. I can’t procrastinate because, if you look around, I’m not gonna find anything more fun to do than make music.’”

While Tudzin dedicated Let Me Do One More to her mom, POWER is the first album of hers that directly and explicitly grapples with the absence her death has left behind. In the process, we get to hear a side of Tudzin we were never properly introduced to six, seven years ago, as she surrenders herself to the humanity of loss. “When you lose someone, everything changes,” she sings at the very end of the album. “Now the good is gone while you’re watching every person around you getting their life done.” It’s natural for us to be resistant to the ways in which grief consumes them. We don’t want to be defined by loss, but it embeds itself into us regardless—and that’s a revelation Tudzin embraces on these songs. It’s a reclamation as much as it is a moment of processing. “I want to be where you are,” she sings on the title track. “I want to feel your power.”

“For a long time, there was a piece of me that was like ‘Maybe there’s a type of record I should write,’ because I’ve seen so many artists I love do that in a beautiful way,” Tudzin says. “Then, there’s a part of me where my personality is so avoidant of that. Even in a therapy context, I will talk about anything else. I’ll avoid a topic or walk around it. And that’s how I was writing—or so I thought. I was writing about anything else, because I couldn’t deal with the reality of my life. But then I was looking back at the songs I had collected and I’m like, ‘Nice try! It’s still in here,’ because it’s so deeply in my psyche at all times.”

And in the same sense, Tudzin’s elopement with Ross is equally as guiding on POWER. She mentioned in an interview that, for as long as she is on this planet without her mom, she will be writing a grief record. But she’s also going to be writing a love record forever. Those parts of her coalesce across a baker’s dozen songs and will continue to do so. A line like “I wish that you had met her” confirms that. Touching love while in the shadow of a great loss is not temporary, and Tudzin could feel that. “It felt good, it felt classic. When I was writing the sappier stuff, I was like, ‘This is what makes music become timeless. This is what makes the Beatles,’” she says, as a bevy of Beatle portraits coincidentally lingers on the wall behind her. “There is a universal truth about both love and grief, that all of humanity will understand at some point in their life. And the coolest thing about songwriting is writing a line where you’re like, ‘Damn, did someone else say this?’—because it feels classic, and love brings about a lot of those truthisms. It feels like it’s been said, but if you can think of a way to say it that’s never been said, then you’re onto something.”

When she was a kid, Tudzin was sure she’d never get married. “That’s old people shit, I’ll never settle down” is what her younger self used to believe. “There’s a piece of my life that I think I didn’t know I would feel so fulfilled by that’s now happened… I’m not gonna say ‘by accident,’ but it’s something I wouldn’t have sought out if I hadn’t met someone like Maddie. I’m also as emo as I ever was, and there’ll always be other things to write about and fiction and fact that’ll sneak its way into songs. I haven’t gone soft yet,” she says, smirking ear-to-ear. Tudzin has been especially vocal about how vulnerability has not always been a source of comfort for her, that the act of expelling and the act of processing can both be a labor as heavy as trauma itself. It can be exhausting even at its most cathartic, but there is a way through—and you can see Tudzin following it on POWER. You can see her, despite what she says, embracing the quiet resolution that pulls her closer to grace.

“After experiencing a lot of extremes in the last half-decade or so, my instinct is to close off and steal myself away and put up a wall and let everything be at arm’s length—because then I’ll be able to do what I need to do to get my work done,” she says. “That is a much more comfortable place for me to be, but when I do have moments of allowing friends or family in, or just making space for there to be some connectivity that frightens me sometimes, I always feel like that end result is a net-positive. I’m hoping that, by revealing more on [POWER], there’s an audience that will be able to see themselves and want to root for that.”

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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.