“Every day’s a blessing/Every day’s a problem,” Sarah Tudzin sings on her fourth album, Power. If the sentiment is ambivalent, the sound is anything but: a sharp power-pop bounce that opens up into a radiant chorus. Tudzin, a Los Angeles singer-songwriter-producer-multi-instrumentalist who has been recording as Illuminati Hotties since the late 2010s, has called her openhearted DIY ethos “tenderpunk.” As a producer and recording engineer she’s worked with artists from Weyes Blood to Coldplay, and won a Grammy for her production on Boygenius’ 2023 landmark, The Record. With Power, she delivers a studio-craft masterstroke without scrimping a bit on the hard-hitting honesty that fuels her writing.
Tudzin goes from the strummy rush of “Throw (Life Raft)” to the neo-New Wave of “Falling In Love With Somebody Better,” to the tough indie-rock chug of “What’s the Fuzz,” nailing every one. Her writing has always been clever: Illuminati Hotties’ 2020 release Free I.H: This Is Not the One You’ve Been Waiting For opened up with a little kicky number entitled “Will I Get Cancelled If I Write a Song Called, ‘If You Were a Man You’d Be So Cancelled’,” while 2021’s Let Me Do One More came with “Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism.” Power has moments like that too. “Sleeping In” is a bubbly tune about about making peace with a relationship that slows you down: “Listening to Arthur Russell/Wait for you to move a muscle.” The album’s lead single, “Can’t Be Still,” rhymes “I’m a ball” with “Adderall,” setting lyrics about feeling unstoppably restless to a sheer melody.
Many of the songs here also deal with tough real-life struggles, particularly the title track, in which Tudzin sings about the loss of her mom over lush bedroom-pop that grows and grows until it almost feels symphonic. She sings movingly about trying to figure out how to keep processing the world when someone who helped ground your experience is gone. Elsewhere, against the tender lo-fi drift of “Rot,” she fights through personal malaise (“Covered in fog/I’m carrying on/It’s impossible),” her voice barely rising above a tense whisper.
The tension between top-level musical know-how and unguarded emotional realism places her in a lineage that runs through indie greats like Tegan and Sara and Liz Phair back to California rock forebears like Brian Wilson. But she’s not going it alone. Power has a deep bench of collaborators, peers like Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz, Melina Duterte (a.k.a. Jay Sum), and ubiquitous alt-pop producer John Congleton. It adds a heartening sense of community to a career-best LP takes the Illuminati Hotties project to a whole new level. Pretty soon, Tudzin might be taking home Grammys for her own records.
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.