illuminati hotties
Power
HOPELESS
How many albums can blow your baseball cap backwards and open up the pit, but just as easily plunge you into a state of poignant, cry-in-the-bath self-reflection? Let Me Do One More, Sarah Tudzin’s previous album as illuminati hotties, wore its many outfits with conviction: its riot grrrl satire, its devastating eulogy to Tudzin’s dog, its absurdist low-key violent lyrics (“I’m biting my lip and I’m biting yours, too / ’Til the blood tastes like chocolate goo”)—not to mention its inclusion of “MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA,” easily the most outlandish, unique indie-pop song of 2021. With her new album Power, Tudzin has purged most of the mischievous experimentation from her system; the leftovers feel made by someone in a happier place, but largely lack the moxie and irreverence that set her apart.
The stench of love hits you first. Tudzin got married in 2023, and her honeymoon contentment is all over Power. It’s not that love was absent before, though. “The Sway” from Let Me Do One More is one of the greatest love ballads ever (I’ll die on that hill), as Tudzin pleaded her muse to “soft split a borrowed 12 of Modelo” and “share all your stains and your bruises with me” over the warm ticking of an ersatz drum loop and offbeat acoustic guitar part. Those sentiments are more bizarre (and, therefore, more interesting) than Power’s goofy domestic bliss. “I Would Like, Still Love You” aims in a similar direction, but its listicle lyric format is less witty than it could be, and lines such as “If you drill a hole through my hard drive / Don’t worry, I’m backed up and still I love you” are probably better enjoyed by the lyrics’ recipient.
And that’s fine. But “Sleeping In” is the track I keep returning to out of bemused intrigue. Twee to a farcical extent, it’s either bold and empowered or just mawkish—perhaps depending on your relationship status—with a chorus so blithely jolly you can imagine TV puppets with lifeless grins bobbing to and fro as Tudzin beams, “You like sleeping in so I like sleeping in now.” A couple of times, she just barely pulls us back from the precipice with a word that subverts the pattern (“I’m a wreck, weary, weak, and horny”). But when the penultimate verse is left unfinished—“Love is coexistence / You forget that you’re just living side by side / La la la la la la”—it’s the last straw. What happened to “Love me, fight me, choke me, bite me”?
Other tracks are hard to argue with. “Rot” is the first in the sequence that feels on par with illuminati hotties’ best work; gloomy, drop-tuned guitars are reticent throughout, while Tudzin’s double-tracked whispers discuss losing her mother to cancer. On its heels is a sleek pop-punk standout called “Falling in Love with Somebody Better” on which Tudzin laments, “I wish that you had met her.” She’s interrupted by the occasional surge of distortion—wordless expressions of that same sense of injustice, of a parent being taken away before they got to see this happy version of you. Both songs are beautifully, tastefully put together, but considering Tudzin has produced the likes of boygenius and co-engineered, checks notes, Coldplay—plus the fact that John Congleton and Jay Som’s Melina Duterte have supporting roles—the production was always going to be exceptional.
After a succession of lukewarm singles, the album needed something up its sleeve to fit the this-shouldn’t-work-but-it-does mold. Tudzin delivers that with the despicably catchy “YSL,” which shakes out like an unlikely Squid/Motion City Soundtrack/Wet Leg collab. Only two minutes long, and with stream-of-consciousness references to St. Laurent and Mondrian, it’s one you can imagine was intended as filler—a muck-around in the studio during lunch—but became an accidental stroke of dancey post-punk genius. Tudzin’s rich, well-crafted melodies manage to cut through despite the pitch-shifting vocal effects (and, to her credit, even on the weaker tracks, she never gives us a derivative melody).
Of all the contrasts between illuminati hotties’ past work and Power, the album title (and thus the title track) is most significant. Not only because the implication behind Let Me Do One More was a lightly self-deprecating one, but because Power’s power is gained from someone else, from Tudzin’s wife. Tudzin ostensibly had zero faith in this kind of dynamic when she closed Let Me with the somber proclamation that “being an adult is just being alone / I’ll go back to the couch, let you stare at your phone / We’ll pretend this is normal / We’ll pretend this is growth.” There is real growth on Power: the euphoric understanding that being an adult doesn’t have to mean being alone. Though if “Sleeping In” is anything to go by, it does mean allowing yourself to be a bit cringe sometimes.
