“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.
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
