Negotiating ‘POWER’: A Conversation With illuminati hotties

Music has the capacity to harbor every conceivable human emotion, expression and experience. Amid these endless possibilities, Sarah Tudzin’s songs have always resembled a smile, even when she’s writing and singing about topics that belie the chirp now synonymous with her character. A self-proclaimed “poptimist,” the Grammy-winning studio engineer has distinguished herself as the creative force behind tenderpunk outfit illuminati hotties with a catalog that blurs the line between night and day.

Since their debut LP in 2018, the Southern California quartet have significantly broadened their sound and, as a result, their scope. With their fanbase multiplying and the audiences at their concerts increasing in density with each passing year, they have now dropped their third full-length project. A follow-up to 2021’s widely successful Let Me Do One More, ‘POWER’ features the group pursuing a cleaner sound while ensuring their trademark fuzz always remains within arm’s reach. Fluctuating between defeat, headway, love, control and an understated optimism, the 13-cut LP is arguably the most coherent illuminati hotties release to date.

A month before the album went live, Tudzin joined CLASH to talk about nourishing her craft as she embraces personal expansion, polishing an abundance of material and settling on what makes her happy based on where she currently is in life.

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This isn’t the first time you’ve written songs that are inward-looking and personal, but it is a theme that stands out on this record more than one’s you’ve made before. Is that a byproduct of maturity and letting your guard down or did something specific happen in your life that prompted this approach?

I think it’s all of that — it’s growing up despite my own wishes and being a little more comfortable with my internal dialogue. You’re right, the last few albums were definitely more fictional and play-acting than this one is. Then there were also these big events in my life, both highly traumatic and stuff that brought me a lot of elation … kind of both ends of the spectrum. As much as I wanted to write around all of that, I think my truth kept coming out on these songs. The more I wrote, the more my work was infused with this reality as opposed to a bird’s-eye view of my life.

Did you outline the project beforehand in terms of what you wanted to accomplish in your lyrics, sound and energy or did you just walk into the studio and see how you felt each day?

I wanted to take a more holistic approach on POWER and create the universe before the songs, but it was time dependent and I was in a certain place emotionally. Between those two things, a lot of it ended up being how I’ve made several others records, where it’s just me writing songs, kind of finding out how they fit together later, coming into the studio with an excess of songs to work with and wiggling it down little by little based on where I think they fit into to project or what I’m trying to say.

I’m still chasing this way of making a record that I so deeply admire in other people — not even a concept album, but more like a knowledge of the universe it lives in before the songs are created. Given the way I write, which ends up being daily practice for me, there are songs happening all the time, sometimes faster than their back-end creation. What then ends up happening, when it is time to record an album, is I have a lot of material to draw from and not all of it points to one particular thing.

There’s quite a jump from a song like ‘You Are Not Who You Were’ to ‘What’s The Fuzz’, but an orderly one at that. When you’re packaging the product, are you particular about steering the listener’s headspace through sequencing?

Absolutely. Sequencing an album is just as important as writing songs and producing them; it’s just as big a piece of presenting an album as any other part of making music. I once heard Paul Simon give a masterclass about an album he made in 2011 or something, and he was basically talking about how there are all these emotional tools  you can use to sequence an album. Like if a song dips in tempo, maybe you would want to have it at a higher key than the song before it — depending on how you want the energy to move, perhaps you’d want an upswing even if the tempo was going down, because you still want people to be pulled into it.

You have to think of how the keys fit together, make tempo decisions and consider the emotional arc. I don’t want every transition to have that whiplash from “You Are Not Who You Were” to “What’s The Fuzz.” You can use whiplash to redirect or re-energize people, but I also think there’s some value to putting some of the slower tempo songs next to each other … but not too many because you don’t want this underbelly where people are losing interest either. So yeah, there is a story to be told like a movie when you have a longform piece of music that’s 40 minutes or so.

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Editing down any body of work is difficult because it forces you to differentiate between what you’re dying to put out into the world and what makes the most sense. What’s that process like for you?

In the sequencing specifically, there was a lot of “Do we cut this song?” and “What goes?” and “What stays?” and “Does it all fit?” … just asking myself if every song was pointing toward the theme or emotion that I was trying to convey. Song by song, there was also a lot of relying on collaborators. I went to the studio with [record producer] John Congleton for a week, and he was really helpful in terms of putting things on the chopping block and just ruthlessly cutting through stuff that didn’t need to be a part of the songs. The biggest lesson I learnt from him was asking myself, “Does it all really need to be there to make this song what it is?” A lot of the time, I was able to accomplish what I wanted without making a mess and leaving in fewer distractions.

Other than that, there are always eyes on my work from just being involved with a label and stuff. I’m lucky that they sort of let me do my own thing, but there’s still a bit of “Don’t cut that, we love it” or “This one could maybe go and we would still be happy.”

You’re also a studio engineer, so how many people have a say in what the final cut is and how much of what we hear on the record is you?

For the first time, on this album, I had other writers involved. The bulk of it is still me, as is a lot of the production and engineering. In this case, I also brought in a couple of trusted collaborators on the production side to elevate it in a way I wasn’t able to. For recording, I had a ton of friends come through and play — Jason McGerr from Death Cab For Cutie played drums on a lot of it; my drummer Brendan McCusker and bass player Zach Bilson; Jacob Blizzard, who played guitar on a lot of the past records; my buddy Mal Hauser also played guitar.

Once the songs are written, I have a rough production plan… or not, because sometimes it’s just throwing people in the room and kind of trying to direct. There’s a lot of people playing on this one, as well as me just sort of filling in the missing pieces. I think that my musicianship is a huge strength, but my playing ability is not always what I need it to be to pull off some of those parts, so it’s great to have homies and people I’m inspired by coming in to record. I’m lucky that there are a lot of people in my life who I trust with listening and giving me an objective opinion, but at the end of the day, I have the final say. I don’t know if I would be happy if there was anyone else calling the shots.

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Are there any songs on the new album that you’re dreading playing live because you might not be able to reproduce it as well on stage?

That’s a great question. I’m not sure there’s a specific one that I’m dreading, but I do think this album will take a lot more elbow grease to pull off live as opposed to past ones — with those, we could kind of get away with a lot on sheer musicianship; it made for fun and loose shows. I do think the infusion of pop on ‘POWER’ demands a show with higher production value, so one of my main summer projects is trying to elevate that aspect of my concerts to give these songs the performances they need. I think the band is also ready to step into that role, like allowing these tracks to both sound like the record but also be lifted into the live space like they haven’t before … of course, we haven’t played any of these songs live yet.

Were the songs from your previous albums more conducive to a four-piece or does ‘POWER’ just have a fuller sound?

It’s mostly the arrangements that make a difference. I think we can make any of these songs work with a four-piece, but we also need to make it sound like people are getting their money’s worth. I’d like to think people are coming to our shows because they like the record, so I’d like to play the record for them properly. My band doesn’t come from a place of jamming or making vast and wild arrangements, but I also think that we can gain more control over the songs and take them to the level of a room with a thousand people or a festival with 10,000 people and create the same impact as when you’re listening on your headphones.  

Are there any songs from the new album that you’re itching to perform in front of a crowd?

I think some of the songs in the acoustic world, like the title track ‘Power’ — I’m sort of imagining a really intimate and beautiful arrangement with everyone playing guitar. You know, reorchestrating and using different instruments on stage rather than just one guitar. I’m really excited to play with the others’ instruments instead of your traditional four-piece, like I’m playing rhythm, Sapphire [Jewell] is playing lead, Zach [Bilson] is playing bass. I think that we can mix it up a little and use production to be a little more chameleonesque in terms of what we play on stage.

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Do you attach a lot of value to the album title and cover art, and is there a story behind ‘POWER’?

Obviously my bag is making the songs, and I think that comes much easier to me than some of the other challenges of being an artist. The shirt featured on the cover, I made with Mal Hauser. We sort of created it out of construction paper, and the idea is the duality of what goes on inside: one side is serious, straight-laced and dealing with the darker, deeper pieces of the album while the other is a collage of restlessness and reaching out to the deepest wilderness of the album. It’s not necessarily happy or sad, but I just feel like there was so much of one thing and then another that’s the complete opposite, even within a single song — I wanted to create a visual of that, with the shirt kind of representing this pull and divide that you can even find in me … I think I contain a lot of wild contradictions, just like my music.

The title is really just based on a recurring theme, and these songs were like our negotiation with power. Do we want it? Are we hurt by power? How do we wield the power inside us? How do we interact with the power around us? It just kept occurring over and over again in these songs, without me even having built that universe ahead of time. Once the tracks began falling into place, they were all making sense in a way that felt destined.

You said you made the shirt with your buddy — have you found other mediums to effectively channel your ideas and creativity?

Honestly, I don’t really feel that talented when it comes to visual stuff. It’s this thing that I’ve always wished I could do. I’ve definitely had moments of weird clarity and I’ll just draw something cool, but I usually have horrible handwriting and no hand-eye coordination. I had the idea for the shirt, bought all the paper, started cutting it up and I called in Mal, who is better at executing that sort of thing than me. I kind of got halfway through and then needed some backup. I feel like my eye is better than my technique in that world.

illuminati hotties’ next tour kicks off in late September. Are there cities or countries you’re particularly excited to pass through and are there any you really want to perform in down the line?

You know, I’d love to go back to Europe and the UK. We did that for ‘Let Me Do One More’, and I was shocked that people were showing up to our concerts. I had no concept of whether or not anyone had heard of us in these cities. I’d love to do Australia; I’d love to do Japan — there’s so much of the world I haven’t seen as a person, you know, let alone as a touring band.

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You got to work on the debut boygenius LP and you even toured with them. How did that partnership come to fruition?

I’ve been friends with Lucy [Dacus] for a long time, and I have now also become friends with Julien [Baker] and Phoebe [Bridgers] as well. They were in town, making The Record, and Lucy sent out the bat signal, like, “Hey, can you come help us out? We’ve got a lot of material and we don’t have that much time left in the studio, so I think we need some additional hands on the project.” So I was able to go out to Malibu and work with them, which was a dream.

My production work and my band life are a little bit separate, and I don’t ever go into the studio expecting to be on tour with those same people. I think that it was really nice to be a part of the album’s live cycle as well. They graciously offered me some shows and we played to our biggest crowds ever and got to hang with the gang and they’ve all become dear friends.

And now you get to say you’ve won a Grammy.

That’s right, Best Alternative Album is what I got the Grammy for. boygenius didn’t win in the big three categories that they were nominated in, but they won these other three in the pre-show. There are all these technicalities with the Recording Academy, and it was all a little unclear because it depends on how you’re credited on the album, but as a sound engineer, the Best Alternative Album Grammy arrived at my house.

When you scroll down an artist’s page on streaming platforms, the algorithm suggests other musicians based on the one at hand. What names would you be flattered to see on your page or whose page would you like your name showing up on?

If I’m dreaming really big, and I feel like the algorithm works in a way where this would never happen, I would love to be a related artist on Elliott Smith’s page. That would be the greatest compliment I could receive about my music. 

On my page, it ends up being a lot of homies and music I love anyway. I think Ratboys is on there right now. I think there are just a lot of bands on there that were just on a similar album cycle as us for the last six years, even though we don’t necessarily sound alike anymore.

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On TIDAL, you have the Beths, Car Seat Headrest, Courtney Barnett, Snail Mail, Angel Olsen and Bully showing up on your profile.

That’s an iconic lineup, like make the festival happen. The Beths is a huge compliment to me — another band of homies who are just making the best songs possible.

And finally, who are you listening to right now? Are there any artists you would recommend to fans of illuminati hotties?

I have a horrible answer for that question, because I’ve just been listening to really insane jungle, drum and bass music in the car these last three days. I’ve just been putting on playlists that have some big names, like your regular Aphex Twin-type projects. For some reason, my whole TikTok algorithm now is people making beats on the old Commodore 64, where they have a tracker running, and I just got obsessed with that over the past week.

Oh, the other one in heavy rotation this summer … Pitchfork has been doing these “What is your 10/10 record?” videos, and Jason Balla from Dehd recommended this Yves Jarvis record called Good Will Come To You that I completely forgot about, so I put it back on and it’s beautiful. It’s just great summer music!

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‘POWER’ is now available on all streaming platforms. illuminati hotties will be performing across North America this fall as part of their Can’t Be Still Tour.

Words: Karan Singh
Photography: Shervin Lainez, Karan Singh

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