Sarah Tudzin on getting big on Illuminati Hotties’ new album
Sarah Tudzin wants to make records that come alive in the details. Increasingly, the Los Angeles-based songwriter, engineer and producer appears to be DIY’s answer to the studio musicians of the 1970s, carving out detailed, lived-in environments for her own songs as leader of Illuminati Hotties – a gauzy, gonzo strain of indie-rock she calls ‘tenderpunk’ – to get up and walk around in. Power, her latest LP, is funny, snotty, and fizzing with hooks, but it also sounds unreal: maximalist and daring in a way many records in this realm wouldn’t entertain. “There’s a lot of world-building on the production side,” she says during an early morning Zoom call.
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“There are so many bands I admire who just put up the mics and play,” she continues. “And that’s the magic of that band. I would love to do a record like that for myself, but some people shred on guitar, and I shred on engineering and producing now. My ability to chop something into shape, or use recording tools to create a magical moment, has surpassed my ability to do that just as a musician at this point.”
Record Breaker
As a producer and engineer, Tudzin won a Grammy last year for her work on Boygenius’ The Record. But that cherry sat on a tiered cake – she was also coming off roles on Weyes Blood’s magisterial And in the Darkness Hearts Aglow, Speedy Ortiz’s comeback record Rabbit Rabbit and the Armed’s hardcore fever dream Perfect Saviors. Already in 2024, her fingerprints are all over the noisy new Cloud Nothings LP and Eliza McLamb’s gossamer Going Through It.
“Hotties is a place where I don’t have any rules,” she says. “If I pick up a trick somewhere else and I want to flip it on its head, do something crazy, I have the opportunity to do that with my own music. With another person in the room, obviously, I want to respect their creative instincts and finish a song with them that they feel excited about. But with Hotties it’s like, ‘I’m going to make a drum and bass thing and see if I can hide it somewhere.’ Maybe a singer-songwriter with a guitar is a little more hesitant to try something like that.”
Sarah Tudzin
Since releasing the first Hotties record, Kill Yr Frenemies, in 2019, Tudzin has found different ways to deploy this impulse. The following year’s FREE I.H: This Is Not the One You’ve Been Waiting For – a mixtape that cannily got her out of a deal with the faltering label Tiny Engines – leaned into the scattershot, berzerk side of her writing. Released by Snack Shack Tracks, her own Hopeless Records imprint, the ensuing Let Me Do One More traded in detailed mood pieces, from strident, colourful indie to surfy garage-rock.
Power, though, is on another wavelength again, with Tudzin training her kaleidoscope on songs that often skew more straightforwardly pop. Throughout, heavyweight drums anchor strident power chords and popping-candy synths, with her priorities changing from song to song as she pulls on elemental emotions – the shifting sands of grief following the loss of her mother to cancer in 2020, or the heady, almost unbelievable, embrace of love.
There are moments here, such as the bubblegum-rock Cavetown collaboration Didn’t, that feel like the physical embodiment of the words “chunk” or “crunch”. But, equally, in the half-whispered Rot there is the considered heft of the Shins’ early stuff, even a hint of the way the insistent snare on Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Maps might eventually crack your ribs. “I wanted everything to feel loud in a 2000s way,” Tudzin says. “I feel like music has been a little afraid to be loud lately.”
Block Party
From the outside, it’s often like Tudzin is playing Tetris, dropping blocks into spaces that open up, relying on chops and good taste over a rigid framework. “I think a lot of it is instinct, or checks and balances,” she says. “If the drums are scorching, what needs to be lower in the mix? You only have a certain amount of real estate. If there’s something very clean and beautiful happening, do I want that to be the song? Or, do I need to interrupt that somehow?”
“I’m a bit of a pop nerd,” she continues. “And something that is very impactful to us as humans is loud drums and loud vocals. It’s the most primal way to have someone feel attracted to music. That was very important on this album – it was constantly louder vocals, louder drums, and then everything else had its place in the mix. There was a little bit of pushing stuff out of the way that, in my more punky moments, I would have wanted louder. But in this case, I felt pretty strongly about trying to get the words intelligible and the drums loud enough to move people.”
There are guitar sounds here that range from Third Eye Blind stomp to crystalline lead lines, but rarely do you get the sense that Tudzin wanted to stray too far from gut-level noise as her guiding principle. There are all sorts of DayGlo synthetic flourishes on Power, but the guitars are often equally brazen. “I kept coming back to wanting to have this Weezer thing happening,” Tudzin observes. “Just drive and volume, nothing crazy, while maintaining a hooky, loud guitar alongside the vocal. I think Weezer does that in a really powerful way on some of their songs. It’s weird, because that was a band I avoided when I was a kid. But now, there’s something cool about it – there’s the garage-scrappy thing but it’s also radio rock. It’s fascinating, the way that it was so absorbed by the culture and yet they were just rock nerds, you know?”
Desert Sounds
Some of the impetus for Power came from a head-clearing retreat to the desert around Joshua Tree, but a lot of its early throes went down in a less esoteric space. Tudzin would wake up, pick up her guitar and just start writing, as though the habit would prove self-sustaining. “I wrote a lot on this rubber bridge parlour guitar, which ended up being a box I had to sort my way out of,” she reflects. “That guitar, from Old Style, is such a song machine. It’s so easy to write on and so inspiring, but once you record the demo on it, you’re like, ‘Does it need to be in that muted guitar world?’ I had to lose that in the production process.”
To do that, Tudzin threw a lot of paint at the wall and then had to figure out how to pick some of it off. A crucial waypoint in Power’s journey came with a spell working alongside John Congleton, who has come to occupy a role as sounding board and judicious editor during these flights of fancy. “I always do more than I probably should,” Tudzin admits. “John is amazing at axing stuff. Instinctively, he is like, ‘This is working, this is not.’ We did a lot of losing pieces, which has always been challenging for me.”
Later, Tudzin roped in collaborators from her touring band, including bassist Zach Bilson and drummer Brendan McCusker, alongside returning guitarist Jacob Blizard and former tourmate Mallory Hauser, to bring the record to life. During a period of tracking in Washington, Death Cab For Cutie drummer Jason McGerr also sat in. “That was a mind blowing, never-thought-it-could-happen experience,” Tudzin says.
“I usually bring people in because there’s stuff I can sort of fake my way through, but there comes a certain point where I need a real performance of it,” she continues. “And then there’s stuff that I noodled through on my own because it was easier to play what I wanted to hear than to coach someone else through it, who has other creative instincts than I might have. It always becomes like a bit of a party, just grabbing people to come play stuff and have fun and make a little noise.”
Largely utilising a Princeton, Congleton’s Twin Reverb and a boutique amp built for her by the St. Louis company Mills Custom, Tudzin stuck relatively closely to her touring arsenal, playing her Telecaster off against a Reverend Crosscut and a few oddities from Congleton’s collection. “The Crosscut has been a great bridge between classic guitar sounds and a modern edge,” she says.
“There’s a lot of control in the pickups and there’s a tone roll off…you can really make it sound very modern and very powerful, and you can get some jangling, vintage guitar-into-an-amp sort of sounds. Congleton has a Frankenstein guitar with a banjo head in it and that ended up showing up over and over again on some weirder moments. Mal has this amazing Strat with gold foils – that’s quite an interesting guitar that appears a little bit on the album.”
It’s testament to the songs, and Tudzin’s wit and off-kilter verve as an arranger, that all of this meticulous thought blends into the background once the first chorus hits. Equally, though, you could spend countless hours happily trying to unpick each strand she has threaded into the whole. While you’re doing that, she’ll probably be making something new. “Both sides of my career have been able to feed one another,” she says. “My production work is only helped by the work I’ve been doing in the band, and then the band has been helped by the production work. I haven’t had to choose, which is really special.”
Illuminati Hotties’ ‘Power’ is out August 23 on Hopeless Records
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