Sarah Tudzin is in high demand these days. Not only is she a lauded engineer and producer who has helmed recent records by boygenius, Weyes Blood, and Speedy Ortiz, but her own band, Illuminati Hotties, has also emerged as one of the sharpest and most sensitive acts on the pop-punk side of indie rock this century—“tenderpunk,” she has often called it. On Illuminati Hotties’ radiant and bittersweet third LP, Power,Tudzin pairs that sense of modern professional busyness with scenes inspired by the extreme highs and lows of her personal life in recent years. To wit, the day before Tudzin released 2020’s surprise Free I.H, her mother died. But weeks before that, Tudzin had met the person who has since become her longtime partner, the one with whom she can share all these troubles. It’s not hard to imagine, then, all that propels Power. This is an album, though, neither about loss nor love but instead about the life that we live amidst such ups and downs. While there are some beautiful blues here, like the tender finale “Everything Changes” or the haunted “Rot,” Tudzin mostly looks for an exuberant way through these tangles. The inescapable “Falling in Love with Somebody Better” is a pop-punk treasure where she wishes her mom had met her new love, while the breezy “Sleeping In” finds contentment in the compromises that a good relationship demands. Loaded with guests who alternately complement Tudzin’s unfailing melodic instincts (Cavetown, Death Cab for Cutie’s Jason McGerr, John Congleton) or help her cut loose from them (especially Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis during the riotous “What’s the Fuzz”), Power is a prime culmination of all the things that have kept Tudzin busy in recent years—her skills in the studio, her knack for a hook, or the mere travails and triumphs of existence itself.
