“Vulnerability is not my comfort zone, and I don’t even feel like this album is softer as much as it is realer than anything else I’ve done,” she says. “In its softest moments, I still felt that it was important to keep the volume loud. I was admiring a lot of 2000s bands that were intimate and soft, but still weren’t afraid for it to feel like they were blasting through the radio, even if it was a ballad or a sweeter song, like The Shins or maybe Modest Mouse.”

The album’s title, POWER, takes its name from a title track where Tudzin addresses her mother’s passing most directly, singing “I want to be where you are / I want to feel your power” in its chorus. The track finds her talking about a certain stabilizing energy that has vanished from her life, while Tudzin is left to ponder how to tap back into it.

“My mom had everything in control in a way that didn’t feel neurotic or overbearing, but comforting in its lack of chaos,” she says. “As a realist, it’s a hard space for me to think about finding a connection with someone who’s not a part of this Earth anymore. Some people are really able to find signs, but for me, I feel like I’m on a warpath to figure out how to connect, or if there is connection to be had.”

Tudzin has mentioned before that she isn’t surprised her career – both with illuminati hotties and behind the boards – has been taking off in the midst of personal turmoil, since she feels as though she works to distract herself from things. With more things to be distracted from, more music abounds.

A couple tracks on POWER address this – there’s “Sleeping In,” a track about adapting to her partner’s more laid-back lifestyle, which was written spontaneously when Ross and her friends convinced her to stay a couple hours longer at a weekend getaway in a California cabin before returning to work. Then there’s “Didn’t,” a self-proclaimed “slacker anthem” where Tudzin ponders the consequences of simply not meeting her deadlines.

“I think I’ll always have a bit of a struggle with balance in work and life – you know, work is life for me in a lot of ways.”

“I think I’ll always have a bit of a struggle with balance in work and life – you know, work is life for me in a lot of ways,” she says. “My social life is with musicians, my work life is with musicians, most of my hobbies are musical … I’m obsessed! It makes it a little harder to draw the boundary between working hours and playtime.”

While Tudzin will say that she’s found a lot more confidence as a frontwoman and that performing and producing “fill different cups,” at the end of the day, there’s a certain tinkering gene that allows her to get in the zone behind the boards. It makes sense, for someone who was ushered into the world by a legend like Susan Rogers. Best known for being Prince’s recording engineer, she taught Tudzin at Berklee College of Music.

“She came up at a time when there were very few women, and very few people who were not musicians working in music,” Tudzin says. “She’s very clear about the fact that her superpower in the studio is taste; she can’t play any instruments. From her, I learned how to be a producer by understanding emotional impact and how best to do that. There will always be better guitar players than me, better drummers. What I’m concerned with is executing the intent in the best way possible.”

Often listing some of pop’s earliest innovators like Harry Nilsson and the Ronettes as influences alongside Minor Threat and Black Flag, a lot of Tudzin’s work does aim to find the catchiness and universality of a pop radio hit where you might not expect it. She believes that there’s something beautiful about a track that gets stuck in the collective heads of a society, uniting them through something silly and fun.

“The enduring element of pop geniuses is that they’re doing something we’ve all heard before, but in a completely new way. Like, they’re just saying ‘Let’s party,’ but not in a way you’ve ever heard it said,” she says. “There’s undeniable human connection that’s happening. There’s a lot of pop artists getting industry money pumped into their campaigns, and that’s a reason that songs end up everywhere – but how a song becomes ‘song of the summer?’ That’s up to human connection only.”

Tudzin draws reference to a track like Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” that stood the test of time in this way – although we heard it playing on loop in the grocery store, with that industry money telling us it was our favourite song, listening back to it a decade later reveals that it actually was that good. Make no mistake, though – although she describes POWER as the furthest thing from the punk genre that she’s done under the illuminati hotties name, Tudzin is still a punk through and through.

“What’s punk about this album is the attitude that I try to carry through my life, which is irreverent and unbothered by what is cool. Indie rock is empty of loudness, and I think that this record is doing something different than the easiest or most likely approach to indie rock. It’s also me expressing, in my naturally punk way, of disclosing feelings.”