Illuminati Hotties’ Amazing Twisted Punk-Pop


LOS ANGELES — Sarah Tudzin the night before filming the music video for the first single from her group illuminati sexy girls‘ on her new album, director Katie Neuhof texted a picture of the green, gelatinous globe cooking on her stove. In the middle of the clip, which was enthusiastically titled “Mmmoooaaaaaayaya,” Nickelodeon-style would spill over Tudzin’s head.

“Oh yes, what’s in it?” Tudzin, the band’s 29-year-old founder and lead singer, answered. “By the way, I am allergic to dairy!” This was news. An emergency screening of the ingredients in jelly vanilla pudding powder, green food coloring, and applesauce confirmed that the slime was actually lactose-free. Then Tudzin cheerfully recalled, “I was completely ready.”

“Mmmoooaaaaaayaya” is the second track from Illuminati Hotties’ thrilling genre-defying album “Let Me Do One More,” to be released Friday. “I wanted to smack people on the head with something that wasn’t kiter,” said Tudzin, who released it as the first single. After the song’s chords, dissonant guitar blades, and a shuddering Jenga tower of Dada-like reflections on modern life (“Do you think I want to be a part of every self-throwing new venture?”), the chorus enters one of the most memorable. hooks you’ve heard through the ages – a kind of wordless, devastatingly stupid first cry into the void.

“He can make any sound he wants,” singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus, Tudzin’s friend and former tour mate, said in a phone call. His music has a full range of emotion: you might be coming to a party but then, dammit! You feel something. I like that it never keeps you in one mood for too long.”

Tudzin, a recording engineer and producer who has been releasing music as the Illuminati Hotties since 2018, said producer Chris Coady, who employed him at his studio for several years, “invented his own genre”. Tudzin’s name: “tenderpunk.”

“Let Me Do One More” is a creative leap (he calls them Little Shredders) that embraces new sounds and song forms, and seems to increase the number of fans. Its release on the independent record label Hopeless Records also represents a professional triumph. In May 2018, Illuminati Hotties signed with Tiny Engines and released their debut album. “Kiss Yr Frenemies.” In 2019, a few of the label’s artists blamed their leaders financial mismanagement. He owed another album to Tudzin’s contract, but he did not want his proudest artistic achievement to yet reach the struggling label. So, in a few hurricane weeks that winter, he wrote and watched a 23-minute LP to fulfill his commitment. He classified it as a mixtape and gave it the cheeky title: “Free IH: This Is Not The One You Expected.”

Musicians have a long and storied history of quickly trashing albums to break free from restrictive record contracts. Most of these albums suck. “Free IH” was pretty good, almost incidentally, invoking both the sugary power-pop hooks of first-era Weezer and the wild punk-rock eclecticism of the Minutemen. Lyrically, Tudzin has the knack of expressing how difficult it can be to establish real human relationships in a world increasingly riddled with the remnants of an absurd consumer culture. In the first song of the mixtape she yells “Let’s do a podcast”. “We’re going to cry at Denny’s Grand Slam tomorrow morning.”

Tudzin takes all these elements one step further in “Threatening Each Other: Capitalism”, one of the songs that most influenced the song “Let Me Do One More”. A slow-burning ballad pushed by smashing guitars, the song strikes a signature balance between humor and emotion.

“I am always looking for ways to connect the global picture to a personal narrative,” Tudzin said. “I guess that’s what helps me connect universally and connect with other people, person-to-person.”

He grew up in Tudzin Valley, but Downtown Los Angeles, where we met in a library in August, brings back memories of his teenage years leading up to shows at Smell, the all-ages venue nearby. (We entered the library after the nearby bookstore we were considering to check out was closed for a movie shoot – that’s a modern irony that wouldn’t be out of place in an Illuminati Hotties song.) He took piano and drum lessons from an early age, and had adequate classical and jazz training, but was a drum teacher around the age of 10. Something clicked when she taught him that he could play along with the records he listened to in his spare time.

“I asked a friend of mine to burn me some CDs and he lent me some Green Day and some Blink-182,” Tudzin said. “And then it’s like, game over

After graduating from the grueling production program at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, he was horrified to learn that Tudzin was expected to cut his teeth as a “runner” a few years earlier. He can use the technical skills he learned at university.

“It was a really bad environment,” he said while working in a large studio. Six weeks later he resigned and sold his resume all over Los Angeles, eventually taking a job as an assistant with producer Will Wells (the “Hamilton” cast was among the projects they were working on recording the cast) and later his mentor Coady. Instantly fascinated by Tudzin’s chops.

“We got to work on Day 1 – he already knew ProTools better than I did,” Coady said. “Sarah hasn’t made a single mistake,” he said in the three years they’ve worked together. “I was lucky because such nice people usually don’t stay around for long.”

Around this time, Tudzin started the Illuminati Hotties as a calling card for an aspiring producer rather than a real band: “I said, how do I convince some bands I meet at a show that I can record them? One of the ways was to record my own and be like, ‘This is totally me dating.

Tudzin would upload “Kiss Yr Frenemies” to Bandcamp and move on, but Dacus convinced him to “respect your own work enough to give it the breathing space it deserves.” Which meant sending it to tags. Tiny Engines offered to extinguish it. The sudden recognition was exciting, but in retrospect Tudzin regrets that he didn’t read his contract more carefully—especially the part where he left his masters.

As Tudzin sipped our iced coffees in the library cafe, Taylor Swift said, “If you can be fooled with all that crew around, just imagine a small group doing local shows and never done this before.”

A silver lining to Tudzin’s contract debacle is that his new deal allowed him to create and co-release “Let Me Do One More” on his own imprint, Snack Shack Records. He hopes to sign a list of indie bands he loves and make sure they don’t make the same mistakes he made.

In late 2018, the demands of the Illuminati Hotties pushed him to “graduate” (Coady’s word) from the role of studio assistant and engineer, but during the pandemic, Tudzin was able to take on remote production jobs and survive a bit more easily. musicians who only rely on the tour. While the increased attention “Let Me Do One More” will likely bring will likely make the balancing act a little more precarious, Tudzin hopes to divide his time as a musician and producer as he tries to create his own little corner of music. The industry is a more humane place to work. As long as he’s still having fun.

“I just want to make it fun for me and I’m happy to have so many people on board who want to be a part of it,” he said. “It definitely makes it more fun to create the space I want to be in.”





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