Hello and welcome to REPLY ALT, the world’s only and therefore greatest email newsletter about music. Sometimes I use this newsletter’s built-in podcast feature. (Please see previous episodes with Chris Farren, Lauren Denitzio [Worriers], Todd Taylor [Razorcake], and Jenny Owen Youngs.) And today I’m once again taking a crack at it with a new episode, featuring an interview with Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties. (Also, I submitted the podcast to all the services so you should maybe hopefully be able to listen on Sportify/Arple Music, etc.)
This episode was recorded at Razorcake studios in Los Angeles. This is a no-brainer but subscribe to Razorcake if you don’t already, ya dinguses! Punk rock journalism delivered right to your doorstep. Comics and interviews and record reviews and ink that smears on your fingertips. Can’t beat that!
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In November of last year, a series of tweets from the band Adult Mom aired out some grievances with their indie label, Tiny Engines, accusing them of being delinquent on royalty payments and being unwilling to relinquish ownership over the masters of their albums. The label, which had served as home to Beach Slang, Cayetana, and Mannequin Pussy, went dark after that. As of writing this, they haven’t published any news on their website since November 5, and the last time they were active on Twitter was November 7, when they retweeted a performance from one of their promising young acts, Illuminati Hotties.
Illuminati Hotties mastermind Sarah Tudzin watched all of this label drama unfold and thought to herself: Oh fuck. She had been working on a record for a year and a half, intended to be released as her second LP of a two-album contract with Tiny Engines, and was understandably skittish about handing it over to a label whose future had a big fat question mark hanging over it. So, she put the record on the shelf and got to work making what she calls “a decoy record.” The result is Free I.H.:This Is Not the One You’ve Been Waiting For, an album she made, start to finish, in three weeks. Tudzin, a studio engineer, threw every trick she knew at the project, taking influence from everything from Black Flag to Cardi B.
Free I.H. features a few straightforward and catchy indie pop songs, for which she’d been known, but there are also endless left turns on this weird, eclectic record. When she listened back to the finished product, she realized she’d accidentally made something she really liked.
And I like it too. In fact, I love it. Free I.H. speaks to Tudzin’s studio mastery as much as her strength as a musician. There are noise tracks, calypso beats, some frantic Melt Banana-style rippers, and some good ol’ fashioned punk jams. It’s funny, it’s self-deprecating, it takes a few subtle digs at its own contract-fulfilling nature. It is the Album of the Summer™, and it was made completely by accident.
Sarah and I recently sat down to chat (~FROM A RESPONSIBLE DISTANCE~) about making the album by mistake, flushing dogs down the toilet, getting spammed by illuminati conspiracy accounts, the mugshot photo on the album’s cover, and how the two of us are BEST FRIENDS.
(Ooooh and it appears my newsletter service has finally enabled Bandcamp embeds. It is, as they say, over for you hoes. [The hoes being Spotify.] OK listen to the album below.)
All photos are: 1. perfect and 2. by me, do not use without permission thank you.
At "Home" with Illuminati Hotties' Sarah Tudzin