“I like to use the word ‘goth-adjacent,’” Erin Hoagg offers when contemplating the genre of her Rare DM project over Zoom in mid-May. She’s chilling in her home studio in the LES, ready to discuss her upcoming album Attention. "Bloghouse-influenced," she says. "Let’s go with electroclash moon, dark wave rising, and electronica sun."
The NYC artist released her debut LP Vanta Black in 2019. “I was devastated, heartbroken, and cried every day for six months,” she recalls of the time. “I made that album really fast.” The result is a lush, ethereal collection of songs that transform the personal into something celestial. As she goes through the motions of lovesickness — being warned about someone, falling in love with them anyway, watching it all go wrong, begging for them to stay — synths sputter and buzz. Comparisons could be drawn to Boy Harsher or John Maus (“Isn’t ‘Bennington’ like one of the best songs ever written?” she says about the latter), which would probably be more productive than trying to place her in a specific category.
“My problem with labels is that, first of all, dark wave has a ceiling, and I want nothing to do with the ceiling,” she says. “I am going through the fucking ceiling. Fuck the fucking ceiling.”
“Secondly, I’m too much of a pop star to be constrained to that fucking genre,” she continues. “I love performing too much, and I’d love to do some dance routines on stage. I’d say that post-punk is a really strong influence, though, because my favorite album of all time is Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights. That’s probably influenced me more than anything.”
Attention, out this Friday, retains the confessional intimacy of Vanta Black while turning up the party and the attitude. Opener “Compliment” serves as a sassy anthem designed for the club; “LA Traffic,” the final single out today, is an impish self-drag about Hoagg’s tardy tendencies. But it’s also a stylish, acerbic portrayal of the deep-rooted artifice that the City of Angels is known for. “‘Let’s check your social resume. Who are you? What do you do? Where are you from?’” Hoagg exemplifies, which she clarifies is common in New York, too. “Both the casual conversation that’s the small talk that people have, but also the way that people size each other up. I think this was one of those gold moments that when it comes to the bassline, I don’t know how the fuck I did it. It’s some huge LFO situation on my Juno-60 that I was doing, some sort of arpeggiator that I couldn’t replicate if I tried right now, because it was so fucking sick that it sounds kind of like my version of Charli XCX’s ‘Vroom Vroom.’”
Seven years is a considerable gap between records. Instead of being beat down by COVID hitting one year after her debut, she experienced the opposite. “I considered the pandemic my opportunity to catch up,” she admits. “Honestly, I saw so many musicians just absolutely devastated by the fact that they had tours canceled, plans canceled, and I was like, ‘I don’t have shit. You fuckers are crying. I am fucking catching up to you, or I’ll be damned.’”
“TikTok used to be really fun during the pandemic,” she adds. “It was split up into corny people who just do dances and then gear videos. I got to be on the gear video side of TikTok, and people that have never heard of what a synthesizer is but loved Stranger Things would be like, ‘Holy shit, this sounds amazing! How do you do it?’”
But putting out music without a record label — an intentional decision — was not an easy feat. Vanta Black had been independently released and anticlimactic. “At the time I had a little bit more money, so I [hired a publicist]. I got in Paper, I got in Nylon, nothing mattered, nobody gave a shit, the album didn’t really do anything or go anywhere, I started to feel not even that proud of it.”
In fall 2020, the otherworldly loosie “Send Nudes” and its cinematic music video blew up, inspiring her to increase her budget for future music videos in hopes of a similar outcome, which she would soon regret. When she locked in opening slots for Belarusian post-punk giants Molchat Doma, her spirits were lifted and she pivoted to focusing on live performances instead. But even that was becoming a problem.
“I was still feeling just really discouraged that nobody gave a shit about my music, and nothing was happening on Spotify, so it just kind of got so in my head,” she explains. “I had some people that worked in music that were like, ‘Singles are the only way to go, nobody gives a shit about albums anymore, you just gotta feed the machine, do singles,’ and then I had other people that were like, ‘You have to do an album, and if you don’t do a full album, we can’t get your tours booked, and we can’t do anything for you.’”
"I got bullied into submission to doing an album," she concludes. "Finally. Thank god." What happens next is unknown. What is known, though, is that the album rocks. Her unlimited loquaciousness in conversation makes her pithy lyricism all the more impressive. The songs achieve a disorienting balance of claustrophobic and capacious, like a labyrinth of liminal corridors leading to a sprawling dancefloor laden with sweat and smoke. If there’s a ceiling, she’s going through it.
Attention is self-released 5/29.
