Keeping existential dread at bay has been an underlying current for illuminati hotties since day one. When it inevitably does rear its anxiety-inducing head, Sarah Tudzin is quick to swat it away with a quick quip. Feeling like you're failing in life? Well, maybe you never really tried to begin with. Broke and in debt? Time to find that fourth job!
But by the time it came to write album four, Tudzin was grappling with two of life's biggest changes: love and death. Tudzin married fellow artist Maddie Ross in 2023 following her mother's death from breast cancer in 2020. Sarcastic deflections weren't going to do the trick anymore. It was time to face reality head-on.
Produced by Tudzin who is, of course, a Grammy-winning producer as well as a songwriter, POWER doesn't sound too different from IH of the past; melodic hooks and buzzy guitars anchor indie and pop-punk song structures. Still, she tapped indie super-producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Explosions in the Sky) to help out, pushing Tudzin to question her choices and look beyond her usual bag of songwriting strategies. His keen ear helps make POWER Tudzin's most sonically complex album, with electric and acoustic guitars, keyboards, strings, crescendos of feedback and other sounds subtly layered just beneath her bright vocals.
Fitting her new perspective, it's also her most straightforward lyrically. Press materials make it clear that Tudzin doesn't view this as a record about grief or romance; rather, as the title suggests, it's about finding new strength in confronting those emotions, albeit over summery guitar tunes.
Coming from the person who wrote a song called "ppl plzr," the stomping "Didn't," featuring Cavetown, feels like a middle finger to the expectations of others. "What if I just didn't / Didn't do it?" she asks rhetorically on the chorus. "Sleeping in" illustrates Tudzin's joy in sharing someone else's passion — in this case, the title activity — while "The L" celebrates putting one's pride to the side and taking the short-term loss in an argument for the sake of the relationship.
If there's a true crack in the veneer of the record's titles, its closer "Everything Changes." There's a world where this whole record could have danced around the idea of grief, but Tudzin goes for the jugular: "Did you know, everything changes when you lose someone?" she asks over an acoustic guitar. What else is there to say after that?
As a listener, it's tempting to be a bit dismissive of the more straightforward approach. Part of the fun of Tudzin's previous records was unraveling the one-liners and figuring out what exactly was lurking underneath. But that probably says as much about your own mental state as it does Tudzin's newfound clarity.
Just a few years ago, Tudzin eschewed responsibility even as it piled up around her. Now, on album opener "Can't Be Still," she's taking power lunches and handling her biz on the go. It's either an act of conscious adulting or a productive distraction from her thoughts, a sign that maturity isn't an all-encompassing force that includes a loss of one's sense of humour. Well, I guess this is growing up.