The weird world of Allie X

The zeitgeist – finally – seems to have an appetite not just for bubblegum bops but for pop music that’s a little off-kilter, a little dangerous, and a little weird. Casual listeners and hardcore critics alike are giving pop – often dismissed as the “teen girl genre” – its adult day in court.

This seismic shift has been brewing subtly for a long time, and it is owed to a long list of writers, producers, artists, icons, and club kids through the 90s, aughts, and 2010s who saw pop as not just a radio genre but an attitude, a costume, and an art form. What has arguably resulted from this is an audience primed for a layering of the pop genre, one that is interested in exploring not just charting heavy-hitters but also a whole cross section of pop players who inhabit niche yet crucial corners of the genre. Arguably, it’s this pop landscape that has allowed acts like MUNA, Caroline Polachek, Hannah Diamond, Rina Sawayama, The Japanese House, and others to find the successes that they have.

At the center of all this — though often under the radar — has been Alexandra Hughes, the Canadian-born writer-producer-artist known professionally as Allie X. Often donning jet black hair and elaborate costumes, Allie X has become both a mainstay of avant-pop and a culture-definer in her own right.

With three official studio albums under her belt, a host of compilations and EPs, and a list of writing credits that includes cuts with Troye Sivan (on Blue Neighborhood and Bloom), BTS, Leland, Betty Who, and even Lea Michele, Hughes's mark on the industry is undeniable. The inside joke of her fanbase is that she’s an artist’s artist. A dedicated, queer-leaning, internet-obsessed crew, those in the know about Allie X really know. Hughes, for her part, steps into that role gladly.

“I’m kind of living the dream,” Hughes tells me, dialled into our call from her car as she drives around L.A. Gearing up to release the deluxe version of her most recent record — the New Wave masterclass that is Girl With No Face — she’s resolved to build her career into something deeper than a radio-hit machine. “My bills are paid, and I’m creatively satisfied. I think there’s indie bands that already understand that, but if there were more pop girls who understood that they could go about things a little differently, then I think there’d be a lot less broken hearts. And nobody would feel the need to become, like, Ultra-Top-40 famous.”

Classically trained as a child, Hughes got her start competing in music festivals and, later, in musical theater. Born in an Ontario suburb, she moved to Toronto after completing her training to perform with a theatre company in the city. But feeling constrained and underappreciated, ensemble work quickly gave way to writing and producing, first as Alexandra Hughes and then, eventually, as Allie X.

“Moving from theatre school to Toronto and getting an apartment and meeting a bunch of musicians was lovely and eye opening. I learned so much, and I felt a sense of community that I’ll probably never feel again. I felt like I was at so many interesting parties and venues for shows, and it was so rich. It was quite idyllic and beautiful,” she says of that early creative period.

“There were all these people around me that were informing my curiosity,” Hughes tells me. “There was this guy Graham … we tried to collaborate, and we were sort of from two different directions. We never released anything, but he loaned me his Prophet ’08, and it was around that time when I started using Ableton and trying to write in this electronic form.”

Canadian music scene has always had a push-pull relationship with international fame for its homegrown talent. “I remember feeling like I almost had to be self-deprecating about how high I wanted to go,” Hughes says. “Within a month of coming to Los Angeles, I had all of these opportunities and all these people believing in me … It really became a feasible business for me.”

That twenty-something exploratory phase, she says, help solidify for her not just that she could write her own project and be a popstar, but that she wanted to. That decade was about building Allie X and, concurrently, her portfolio as a writer and producer. The world of her project became about accentuating the eccentric. In the hands of Allie X, pop is a motif as much a denotation of “popularity.” In a way, Allie X feels like the emo, cooler sibling of mainstream pop, using a palette of over-the-top synths, angular beats, powerhouse vocals, and coy imagery to build an artistic world that feels both addictive and jarring. Never one to think of herself as “the pretty girl,” her visual taste always leaned away from “the short shorts and crop top” thing. Instead, she became, almost by accident, “the goth pop star.”

Perhaps why all of this worked so well was because it was just her natural instinct. To her core, Hughes saw herself as a performer, and she related to artists like Lady Gaga who weren’t afraid to lean into drama and maximalism. “I saw so many things in her that I related to, the idea that you don’t need to be this pretty girl next door,” she says. That unabashedness also drew to her a devoted, overwhelmingly queer fanbase, a demographic that she acknowledges is inextricable from both her own success and the successes of pop as a genre (and to which she pays homage on the cheeky “John and Jonathan”).

As a project, then, Allie X has always been driven by Hughes’ commitment to herself, her creativity, and her instincts. And on this year's long-player Girl With No Face she let those instincts run wilder than they ever have before. Self-written and self-produced, the album was the product of three solitary years of work and the culmination of a longtime goal.

When the pandemic hit, she found herself kicking around her parents’ house in Canada with not much to do. Bringing her own album start to finish had always been a dream of hers, and she realized she finally had the time to do it. Using an Apollo Twin and a MIDI controller, she made the beginnings of “Weird World.” In the ensuing years, the rest of the record followed, made on tables and makeshift studios between Toronto and L.A. She riffed on whatever analog equipment she could borrow or rent or get gifted.

“When I started making the record, it was quite simply me indulging my taste,” Hughes recalls. She was tired of the industry runaround, tired of the meatgrinder that is writing for charts, tired of chasing trends. With only herself to answer to, Girl With No Face became her response to those frustrations. She turned pop stardom — or, its margins — into a character to explore rather than a goal to achieve.

“The problem with pop – and the industry at large – is there’s this real lottery ticket mentality. We all will invest our time and money in someone that we think is going to become huge, to the point that if they don’t become huge, they’re at a big loss financially. It’s kind of you win big or nothing at all,” she explains. “I think I’m too old to be a pop artist. But also, I don’t give a shit.”

After years of playing the rules of the game, she’s content to do it on her own now. Not only did Hughes shepard Girl With No Face alone musically, but she also has brought the business of her art in-house, too. After years of losing money and time on outsourced decision making, she’s not just acting as her own producer, but as her own management, too. In the Girl With No Face era, Hughes bet on herself in ways she once never thought possible. “I’m a really independent artist at this point, and I think the way the music industry has changed has really lent itself to that,” she says.

Evoking the New Wave coming out of the U.K. in the early 80s — and tinged with Soviet darkwave — the album is a pop record with a punk spirit. Hughes plays with the idea of fame and the idea of performance, playing up the purgatory of being a cult icon rather than shying away from it.

“I held my tongue for about long enough / It’s about damn time that I spoke up / I’m an icon honey, this isn’t a chore / And I need to make money so give me yours,” she bemoans, for example, on “You Slept On Me.” Borrowing from the disgruntlement and lone-wolfishness emblematic of the record’s era of interest — and of Hughes’ arc as an artist writ large — Girl With No Face is the poster child record for the anti-pop pop star. The album doesn’t request your adoration. Rather, it demands your attention and your respect.

“Listen, I’d love for as many people as possible to hear my music. But I think there are so many concessions that we’re asked to make as pop people. Pop girls, especially,” she says. “Nobody realizes that you don’t have to make them.”