illuminati hotties: Power

What a pleasant album! No, seriously, since when do we make indie pop like this? Something that feels weirdly both distinctly 2000s-core mixed with something just this pleasant side of mid-nineties college girl rock? Less rock than Veruca Salt. With a dash of Juliana Hatfield. And with just enough Death Cab twee to make it bop a little. Admittedly sometimes it feels more like Illuminati hottie herself, Sarah Tudzin, was trying to engineer a record more than create a bunch of songs. Like she challenged herself to make a catchy pop record that sounds really good. And if that’s the plan, she succeeded.

The question is if we, as indie rock dorks, want a pop rock record in the year 2025? Or 2024, rather, when this album dropped. And, sure, 2025 is demonstrably worse than 2024 for a shitton of reasons, but you almost wonder what the motivation is behind making this catchy-ass piece of disposable pleasantness. Lying in a field of flowers rather than bouncing in a sweaty club is something that feels antithetical to the age. I’m not talking like punk lownmower slamdancing here, but riding off on a cloud isn’t a mood we generally seek when our country is imploding.

But of course the record isn’t all synth bliss. But there are no edges either. It’s all very controlled and eerily reminiscent of what the Breeders might have sounded like if you ran them through the puppy AI filter. Like Tudzin, Kim Deal is a studio nerd, but even she understood that warts are okay. That imperfections are what make rock music. And while Tudzin gets close on songs like “The L,” which is a pretty damned good pop tune, on close listen, she produces the hell out of every fiber of the thing. Even the little pegs of the needle are planned and perfect. This is followed by a track, “Sleeping In,” that is tropicalia? Yeah, that’s not a genre I know shit about, but the coconut clops in the background tell me I’m on the right track.

The thing is, this is a decent record. If you’re looking for inoffensive pop rock-ish tunes sung by a baby-voiced studio knob twiddler who knows how to write a hook and make good-sounding music, this is for you. A nice entry point for someone in your life who loves the poppiest Weezer tunes and want to hear what they’d sound like if they weren’t written by an Excel file and sung by a dude with an arena-sized hole in his heart [for a young Japanese girl]. There is a lot of craft here, and even a contender for the [much-delayd] song of the summer in “Can’t Be Still,” but even though it’s a good album, I feel like there’s some cynicism bleeding in around the edges. There is a modern sense of what someone out there definitely wants in their 2020s rock music. I’m just not sure it’s me.