illuminati hotties

Sarah Tudzin, who fronts Illuminati Hotties, coined the term “tenderpunk” to capture her sound: pop-punk drive merged with indie rock’s melodic intelligence and lyrics that weigh the pleasures and pitfalls of life before thirty. In addition to writing and performing, she works as a producer and engineer, applying those studio instincts to give her candid, wry material a refined edge. Illuminati Hotties first appeared with 2018’s Kiss Yr Frenemies, sidestepped label complications via the sharp pop of 2020’s FREE I.H: This Is Not the One You've Been Waiting For, and tested wider emotional ranges on 2021’s Let Me Do One More. After several years spent primarily on outside productions, Tudzin returned in 2024 with Power, an album shaped partly by romance and bereavement.

She sharpened her craft inside the Los Angeles scene, engineering and producing for Coldplay, Barbra Streisand, and Lady Gaga as well as indie acts such as !!! and Porches. A Berklee College of Music alum, Tudzin also assisted engineer and producer Chris Coady and earned sound-design credits on the Grammy-winning musical Hamilton. Although she possessed strong songwriting ability, her early focus remained on building an engineering résumé. Noticing that her credits were largely tied to Coady and other producers rather than her own work, she launched Illuminati Hotties as a platform for her songs and production style.

Most of 2018’s Kiss Yr Frenemies was tracked during spare studio hours between outside jobs, initially intended as a demo reel for prospective clients. While working in Nashville, however, fellow musicians including Lucy Dacus and Jacob Blizard encouraged her to release the songs properly. She signed with Tiny Engines, yet mounting financial and structural difficulties at the label prompted her to buy out the contract before delivering the next album. Instead she assembled the twelve-song mixtape FREE I.H: This Is Not the One You've Been Waiting For, which drew strong notice and led her to assemble a live band for occasional Illuminati Hotties shows.

Opting against another traditional label deal, Tudzin started her own imprint, Snack Shack Tracks, in partnership with Hopeless Records. The arrangement yielded the band’s third album, Let Me Do One More, in late 2021. Critical and audience response was favorable, yet the following years were largely devoted to external projects: she engineered and produced Boygenius’s the record (earning a Grammy nomination), handled sessions for Lou Roy’s 2022 release Pure Chaos, Speedy Ortiz’s 2023 album Rabbit Rabbit, and Eliza McLamb’s 2024 LP Going Through It, co-wrote two tracks on Sir Chloe’s 2023 set I Am The Dog, contributed vocals to PUP’s 2022 record The Unravelling of Puptheband, and appeared on Dim Wizard’s 2023 single “Ride the Vibe.” She still found time for new Illuminati Hotties material, issuing “Truck” in July 2023 and unveiling “Can't Be Still” in May 2024. The latter served as the lead single for the band’s 2024 album Power, which paired Tudzin’s sharp pop sensibility with a darker tone shaped by fractured relationships and her mother’s death. An Illuminati Hotties tour followed in September 2024.