Embracing life's extremes with Illuminati Hotties

One half is plain, dark navy, while the other is awash with neon colours of paper shapes patched together and held in place by an invisible bulldog clip. But even this half – the bright, boisterous creation – still has some darkness to it, with a large navy pocket on the chest. The shirt, and the image, leans into dichotomies, and that’s exactly what the Los Angeles native set out to do with Power, which is either her third or fourth album as Illuminati Hotties, depending on who you ask.

“There were extreme highs that were happening in my life that showed up on these songs, and there were extreme lows that were part of that as well,” she tells Best Fit on a video call. One of those highs was her 2023 elopement with indie-pop artist Maddie Ross, and the rosy glow of their marriage inevitably seeps into Tudzin’s writing. “I don’t like anyone else / And you like sleeping in / So I like sleeping in,” she croons sweetly on “Sleeping In”, a euphoric standout track complete with bells, ohhh yeahs and lovestruck ahhhs.

“Sleeping In” represents a side of power that can make you feel full of life, able to overcome anything that stands in your way. But there are darker undertones to the album as a whole. Tudzin lost her mother to breast cancer in 2020, but it's only recently that she has been able to start to really process her death.

Though Tudzin has always been a powerhouse producer, songwriter, engineer and performer, Power is undeniably Illuminati Hotties’ rawest, most unvarnished album yet. Even for a powerhouse there are emotional depths that can be too achingly low to reach for, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. “[Grief] is an extremely hard place for me to go in life,” she explains. “It’s much more fun and much easier for me to just keep it rocking. But, much against my best wishes, grief is a very big part of my life, and I was dealing with it as I was writing. I wrote around it for a really long time.”

Tudzin says that dealing with the loss of her mother, and the fallout from that, came in waves. Good days could take turns for the worse and then switch back again. For a while she was buoyed by her routines, able to go on writing and recording not only for herself but for others, just trying to focus on something – anything – else. No matter what she wrote, though, grief always found ways to seep in through the cracks. “It was unstoppable,” she says, but clarifies that Power is not “a grief record.” “I didn’t set out to write a grief record, because I wasn’t and am still not there. At the same time, I think I’ll be writing that album now for the rest of my life.”

Instead of continuing to avoid or compartmentalise what was going on, Tudzin grabbed on to her grief and faced it head-on. The album’s closing tracks, “Power” and “Everything Changes”, are the arrestingly raw fruits of that labour. The latter is sung at almost a whisper but hits like a sucker punch. There is also power, Tudzin realised, in vulnerability.

Early on in the process, Tudzin knew she wanted to write a quasi-concept record. With songwriting being part of her daily practice, she quickly amassed over 30 candidate songs for Power, leaving her wrestling with each until she was able to settle on the 13 that grace the final cut. “The interaction with power, and how we in our daily lives deal with that concept, weaved its way through all the songs on the record,” she explains. “It was a positive force in some places, a mysterious force in some, and an oppressive force in others. It shows up over and over again in these different meanings throughout the songs. It became the obvious theme, as well as a duality of space and mindset.”

Leaning into dualities is nothing really new when it comes to Tudzin’s work as Illuminati Hotties. Since its inception, “tenderpunk pioneer” has been the unofficial motto of the project. “It’s how I feel about my own way of walking through the world and making art,” she tells me. Taking cues from punk bands and the punk ethos of her adolescence, there has always been a brazen, witty bark to her releases. Hotties classics like “Paying Off the Happiness” and “MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA” are armed with irony and overdrive. But that bark is far stronger than any bite. Power, then, might just be tenderpunk in its most realised form to date.

“I think there’s a sensitive and emotionally capable part of me that is unignorable,” she says. “It's so tangential to my life. I’m trying to find the most punk way to do stuff, but I also think there’s an element of straight-up punk that’s missing a bit of sensitivity that I hope to inject into music, whether it’s my work or how I work with bands I’m producing.”

As impressive as Tudzin’s discography as Illuminati Hotties is on its own, she has an arsenal of production and engineer credits to match. Her fingerprints can be found on albums like Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising, Sir Chloe’s I Am the Dog, 2017's excellent Slowdive comeback, and many more, carving out a place for herself as a cornerstone of modern indie-rock history. One of those credits even earned her a Grammy: boygenius’ cultural phenom, the record.

Having frequented the same music circles, Tudzin and the ‘boys’ had long been mutual friends and fans. And then, in January of 2022, she got a call from Lucy Dacus, asking not only if she was in town but if she could drive up to Shangri-La – the storied studio in Malibu now owned by Rick Rubin – to help finish the record. “When you get the Bat-Signal from Lucy, you can’t just say no,” she says, laughing.

Tudzin trekked up to the lush oceanfront property and camped out for a little over two weeks, making what would become one of the most blockbuster projects in recent memory. “You know, all of the greats have come through there,” she reflects. “The history is very palpable. And, as it is in a lot of large-format studios in LA, you’re kind of working with the ghosts of all the people that influenced you. The studio is beautiful and the house is really cool... it's paradise."

The joy of making the record didn’t just begin and end at the mixing board, though. “On the technical side, in some cases, you don’t know what happens after,” says Tudzin. “You keep producing and engineering other records, and then you don’t really hear about all the stuff behind it.” In the case of boygenius, Tudzin was treated as one of the crew. She made an appearance alongside them at the Grammys – wearing a white suit and pink carnation, no less – and the band had Illuminati Hotties along to open a string of summer shows. The energy at those gigs was electric and infectious, unlike almost anything she’s experienced before, she tells me.

This autumn, Tudzin will set out on the road again, and this time it will be her own headline run. “The way albums come out now, they get thrown into the surf of the algorithm and just kind of wash away,” she says. “Playing a show is still kind of the only way to see the impact an album has had, and it feels really good. You feel like you’re a part of something, and that’s, like, the whole reason to make music.”

Playing these shows, Tudzin explains, will bring Power full circle, a decisive next step in the vision she’s been building as Hotties over the years. It’s a vision she’s fought hard for. In late 2019, the project’s then-home Tiny Engines became embroiled in controversy after several artists on their roster accused them of withholding royalty payments and of general mismanagement. The company began to go belly up and Tudzin, still locked into a contract, had to find her way off the sinking ship. Rather than losing her progress, she banked the songs that were supposed to make up her second album and whipped up the aptly titled mixtape, Free I.H: This Is Not the One You’ve Been Waiting For.

Eventually, she found a home for her work on Hopeless Records, with whom she now releases with her own imprint, Snack Shack Tracks. “The sub-label just became a way that I get to give a stamp of approval, and to be able to stay true to my own brand and my own ethos,” she says. When I ask if, after all those years of hard work, she’s excited to have this elevated level of creative and administrative autonomy, the answer is a resounding yes.

After the years she’s put in, Tudzin has certainly earned her stripes. Whether engineering for others or simply writing for her own peace of mind, every piece of work she touches is imbued with a fearless authenticity and commitment to craft. As she so succinctly puts it, “I don’t see it any other way.”