The Mischief, Pleasure and Levity of Pretty Sick’s New Era

New York grunge revivalists Pretty Sick are shedding their alt-rock skin for a more experimental, electronic sound—a pivot that bandleader Sabrina Fuentes feels she has earned after years of paying homage to the rock heroes that populated her youth. Pretty Sick’s newest EP, Streetwise, carves out a space in the land of dimly lit club music, ready to pack the dancefloor with droves of sweaty bodies and gauzy beats. “When I was writing, I imagined Streetwise playing a tiny club that’s just sweaty, fun and personable,” Fuentes explains. “There’s no green room and not so much separation from the artist and the audience—a bit more of a ‘leaving the party together’ type of thing. We’re all in the same room hanging out, I’m singing, and we’re dancing. Just having fun.”

This free-spirited energy is a long time coming for Fuentes, who has spent the last decade cutting her teeth in the gritty New York DIY scene. She started Pretty Sick in 2014 at 13 years old and has been releasing music under the moniker with a rotating group of band members ever since—releasing three EPs and a debut album along the way. The project has lived in a world of ‘90s noise until now, as Fuentes is ready to embrace the music that resonates with her now that she’s 24. “I grew up on Tumblr, and half of my interests were rock and grunge, which I’ve been listening to since I was born—but I’ve always really loved electronic music,” she says. “In my early adolescence, I got really into witch house, early Grimes, Purity Ring, Salem and Björk, and I loved the Hackers soundtrack growing up, too. All of those things have always formed a big part of my identity as a music fan. That style has always been something I wanted to get into, but I didn’t really know how to get into it. I’ve been doing rock for so long—and I felt so connected to it—but after the last album, it felt like it would be nice to have a change of pace to explore other interests.”

Streetwise employs rich, digital textures in place of fuzzy guitars and pulsating synths in place of garish drums, yet Pretty Sick’s new sound feels as authentic as ever. With lyrics written in her usual wry tone, the heavy gloom of the band’s projects has burned off so that the glittering blithe of a lighter Fuentes can shine through. “Tried And True” eases longtime fans in with a weighty riff, slowly introducing a biting cascade of synths as Fuentes sings, “Don’t you think about me / When all I do is think about you” through vocoder distortion. “Violet” softens things up with a laid-back beat paired with Fuentes’s blasé tone, and “Miami” and “With You” continue this relaxed energy before reintroducing that classic Pretty Sick melancholia. Fuentes brings the wit on “Headliner,” singing that she “master[s] bass lines on the track” in a playful euphemism. “Streetwise” wraps things up with authentic trashy party-girl energy with Fuentes singing, “I’m the queen of the city, I’m the one you adore.” There truly has never been a more accurate declaration.

Fuentes was only able to inject this carefree energy into Streetwise because she’s spent so long working out the agony of her youth in the band’s earnest and bleak debut album. “Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile was about the harder side of being young and all these negative experiences I had growing up as a teen in New York that I needed to process and let go,” Fuentes says. “It was therapeutic making that album, but I also realized, when we were touring it, that I don’t like singing about bad things that have happened to me every night. My approach for the whole new album was to avoid so much heaviness, especially because I felt like I was in a different place. I’d been in London for three years; I was living with a group of friends I loved, and we all made music or art, which was really lovely. For the first time in my adult life, I felt like I could create my own community outside of the one I grew up with in New York, which was really important to me.”

Though the change from guitar-heavy, gutsy rock ‘n’ roll to flashy, bass-loaded beats could feel like a stretch, for Fuentes, it wound up becoming an organic next step in the band’s musical progression. “I spend about as much time at raves and clubs and my friends’ DJ sets as I do at my friends’ band sets at DIY venues,” she admits. “It doesn’t feel like those worlds are too different from each other these days. I feel like rock and electronic co-exist under the umbrella of alternative. Everything [on Streetwise] just came together really organically and naturally. There wasn’t much of a plan going into it just kind of fell into it.” Even though she is leaving the distorted grime and wistful teenage malaise of Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile behind, the new six-song EP still packs a punch with the hefty production from Arthur Nyqvist, who goes by the moniker Woesum.

Fuentes returned to London—where she spent much of her late teens and early twenties—to record with the Swedish producer and dig into this less serious side of her songwriting. “Working with Arthur was dope,” she recalls. “I’m used to writing by myself, bringing it to the band, and then building out the rest of the song around the pieces I wrote. Streetwise was my first time working in a recording studio without a full band—just me and Arthur making beats, which was nice, because it took some of the weight off of me as a songwriter. Especially as a contrast to Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile, which I wrote in lockdown, it was such an isolated way of working. It was refreshing to write with other people in the room and have friends come by—super laissez-faire, whenever anyone was free to jam on stuff. The process opened my eyes songwriting-wise to different ways you could do it, and I have been enjoying it since then. It allows for so much more creativity and unexpected things to pop up in the music. I got to try that with Arthur. I feel like I learned a ton from him.”