Music

The crowd of Britney Spears supporters seemed to being holding its breath as one in the moments before the news broke that James P. Spears had been suspended as her conservator after 13 years.Robert Bordelon, 25, of Los Angeles was the first to tell the crowd the decision had been made, before instantly falling to his knees, sobbing.“They thought we were crazy,” he said through tears. “They thought she was crazy.”The crowd erupted, jumping and cheering. Many fans embraced, seeing it as vindication for the #FreeBritney movement.Arthur Avitia, 30, clutched his black fur stole as he took in the news.“I’m so relieved,” he said, breathless. “This is what Britney has wanted for 13 years, and it’s about damn time.”The news also interested activists who are seeking to advance the cause of ending conservatorship abuse, including Angelique Fawcette, 51, who helped organize today’s “unity rally.”“This is vindication on many levels for many people,” she said after being told the court’s ruling.“It means so much for the hundreds of thousands of people who are locked into conservatorships — both legal and illegal,” she said.As heart rates slowed and the tears stopped flowing, the crowd huddled in small groups, parsing what it means for the conservatorship going forward.Kevin Wu, 37, a data analyst from Los Angeles, has been a fixture at courthouse protests since 2019.“While Britney’s case has garnered attention all over the world, it’s not unique,” he said. “Nothing’s going to change without public awareness.”Mathew S. Rosengart, Ms. Spears’s lawyer, thanked her supporters on her behalf. “She’s so pleased and she’s so thankful to all of you,” he told them outside the courthouse. More

Bugging. Restrictions on spending. Failed efforts to hire her own lawyer.In recent days, three new documentaries have come forward with revelations about the degree to which the conservatorship has exerted control over Britney Spears’s life for 13 years — and the extent to which she sought to regain that control early on, without success.On Friday, for example, The New York Times released “Controlling Britney Spears,” which detailed how Ms. Spears’s father and the security firm he hired to protect her ran an intense surveillance apparatus that monitored her communications and secretly captured audio recordings from her bedroom.Ms. Spears’s lawyer called for an investigation, writing in a court filing this week that her father had “crossed unfathomable lines,” further supporting the need to suspend him as her conservator immediately.Early on Tuesday, Netflix started streaming its own film, “Britney Vs Spears,” which used confidential documents and interviews with people who were close with Ms. Spears to detail the singer’s strong objections to the legal arrangement that went on to rule her life, as well as her attempts to escape it.A third documentary, CNN’s “Toxic: Britney Spears’ Battle For Freedom,” aired on Sunday, and included interviews with some of the singer’s friends and former employees. Dan George, who managed the promotional tour for Ms. Spears’s “Circus” album, says in the film that Ms. Spears “could only read Christian books” and “her phone was monitored.”The Times documentary includes an interview with Alex Vlasov, a former employee of a security firm, Black Box, that was hired by Mr. Spears to protect Ms. Spears. Mr. Vlasov, who worked as an executive assistant and operations and cybersecurity manager, said the firm would monitor Ms. Spears’s communications through other devices that were signed into her iCloud account and share them with her father.The surreptitious audio recording, he said, included her interactions and conversations with her boyfriend and children. (It was unclear whether the court had approved these strategies, and both Mr. Spears and the security firm said in statements that their actions were within the law.)The Netflix film, by the filmmaker Erin Lee Carr and featuring the journalist Jenny Eliscu, reported that, very early in the conservatorship, Ms. Spears had attempted to hire her own lawyer to help her escape the strict limitations of the conservatorship.Ms. Spears is heard on a 2009 voice mail addressing a lawyer, who is not identified, seeking reassurance that her effort to end the conservatorship would not jeopardize her right to time with her two sons. At the time, about a year into the conservatorship, Ms. Spears was represented by a court-appointed lawyer after a judge determined that she did not have the capacity to choose her own.Ms. Eliscu, who said that she knew Ms. Spears after profiling her twice for Rolling Stone, recounts a time when Sam Lufti, Ms. Spears’s friend and sometime manager, asked her to surreptitiously present court papers for the singer to sign; the papers stated that Ms. Spears’s court-appointed lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, was not “advocating adequately on her behalf.” Ms. Eliscu said she met Ms. Spears in the bathroom of a hotel and the singer signed the document, but her wishes were not granted.Ms. Spears was represented by Mr. Ingham until July, when a judge ruled that she could choose her own lawyer.Watch The New York Times documentary that highlighted the “Free Britney” movement, which supports the pop star Britney Spears’s efforts to get out of a 13-year court-sanctioned conservatorship.G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times More

Nearly 100 protesters gathered outside the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in Los Angeles to show their support for the star ahead of a highly anticipated hearing on Ms. Spears’s 13-year conservatorship.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThey began showing up more than an hour before the hearing was set to begin.A man in platform heels and a pink “Free Britney” cape. Nearly 100 protesters, many in crop tops, wigs and eye-popping makeup, gathered outside the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in advance of a highly anticipated court proceeding hearing in Britney Spears’s 13-year conservatorship.The spot has become the de facto hub for the Free Britney movement. Since 2019, online chatter among Britney Spears fans cast doubt on her well-being, after she abruptly canceled a Las Vegas residency and disappeared for weeks from public life.A handful of protesters began showing up at the courthouse then. But the crowds have grown, especially since June 23, when Ms. Spears spoke publicly at a hearing about feeling abused by the conservatorship.Mona Montgomery, 79, of Glendale, Calif., a retired conservatorship lawyer, heard a radio broadcast of the testimony in June.“It was the sadness and articulation of Britney Spears saying everything I already knew about conservatorships. I was so happy to hear the truth coming out on the radio,” she said.“It’s an underground profession, helping people who are falsely incarcerated. But if Britney could open up the doors, it would be great for everybody,” added Ms. Montgomery, who described having to go into care facilities and negotiate with nurses on behalf of victims of conservatorship abuse.Supporters on Wednesday had come from spots around the country. One sign read, “I traveled from PHL to LAX to use my voice for those who are silenced.”Alex Garcia, 28, made the five-hour drive from Sacramento to Los Angeles last night hoping for vindication for the #FreeBritney movement.“We’re not going anywhere until she is free,” he said.Shelby Frohmadder, 30, flew in from Texas yesterday. She’s working on a documentary on Britney Spears for her YouTube channel.“I’m very hopeful today’s the day either Jamie Spears is finally removed or the whole thing is terminated altogether,” she said. More

Adept at blending the sophistication of jazz with the earthy appeal of rhythm and blues, he was later widely sampled by hip-hop artists.Lonnie Smith, a master of the Hammond B3 organ and a leading exponent of the infectiously rhythmic genre known as soul jazz, died on Tuesday at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 79.His manager and partner, Holly Case, said the cause was pulmonary fibrosis.Mr. Smith, who began billing himself as Dr. Lonnie Smith in the mid-1970s, could draw an audience’s attention with his appearance alone: He had a long white beard and always wore a colorful turban. (The turbans apparently had no specific religious significance, and he did not have an advanced degree in anything and never explained why he had adopted the honorific “Dr.”) His playing was every bit as striking.He began his career at a time when organists like Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff were blending the sophistication of jazz with the earthy appeal of rhythm and blues. Mr. Smith was very much in that tradition, but his playing could also display an ethereal quality that was all his own. His music later reached new generations of fans when it was widely sampled by hip-hop artists.Reviewing a 2015 performance at the Jazz Standard in New York, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times praised Mr. Smith’s sense of dynamics. “When he is quiet, he is very quiet,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “During a gospelish song with the singer Alicia Olatuja, he started a solo passage at a level that almost couldn’t be heard and stayed there for quite a while, unspooling jagged, alert phrases that you had to strain to listen to: an easy trick but a powerful one.”Lonnie Smith was born on July 3, 1942, in Lackawanna, N.Y., a suburb of Buffalo, and raised by his mother, Beulah Mae Early, and his stepfather, Charles Smith. As a teenager he sang in vocal groups and played trumpet and other instruments before a store owner’s generosity spurred his lifelong love affair with the organ.As he recalled in interviews, he spent a lot of time in a Buffalo music store, mostly just looking. One day he told the owner, Art Kubera (whom he would later call “my angel”), that he was sure he could make a living in music if he had an instrument. Mr. Kubera took him to the back of the store, showed him a Hammond B3 organ and told him that he could have it for nothing if he was able to get it out of the store. He did, he taught himself to play it, and his career began.Mr. Smith was soon working regularly at the Pine Grill in Buffalo. Mr. McDuff was an early influence, and when the guitarist George Benson left Mr. McDuff’s combo to form his own group, he hired Mr. Smith.The Benson quartet had an inauspicious beginning at a bar in the Bronx, where, Mr. Benson wrote in his autobiography, “Benson” (2014), “Lonnie and I played behind a revolving cast of go-go dancers.” After moving to a jazz club in Harlem, the Benson quartet began building a following.Mr. Smith’s first album as a leader was released by Columbia Records in 1967.Both Mr. Benson and Mr. Smith signed with Columbia Records. Mr. Smith’s first album as a leader, “Finger-Lickin’ Good,” which featured Mr. Benson on guitar, was released in 1967, but his tenure with Columbia was brief. The next year he moved to Blue Note, which had already used him on the alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson’s hit album “Alligator Boogaloo.”Blue Note, which had helped launch the organ-jazz boom by signing Jimmy Smith a decade earlier, was a natural home for Mr. Smith. But after releasing four well-received albums on the label, beginning with “Think!” (1968) and ending with “Drives” (1970), he moved on.He recorded for various labels throughout the 1970s, but by the end of the decade his brand of jazz was falling out of favor and he was growing tired of the music business. He stopped recording and maintained a low profile, performing only occasionally and sometimes under an assumed name.He ended his studio hiatus in 1993 with “Afro Blue,” a tribute to John Coltrane with John Abercrombie on guitar and Marvin Smith on drums, released on the MusicMasters label. (The same trio would later release two Jimi Hendrix tribute albums, “Foxy Lady” in 1994 and “Purple Haze”in 1995.) By that time Mr. Smith’s influence had grown in ways he had never anticipated: His 1970 cover of the Blood, Sweat & Tears hit “Spinning Wheel” had been sampled by A Tribe Called Quest, the first of many hip-hop acts that would find inspiration in his catalog.Mr. Smith began performing again, both with his own groups and with Mr. Donaldson, and eventually returned to Blue Note; his first album for the label in more than 40 years, “Evolution,” was released in 2016. His most recent album, “Breathe,” released this year, included a surprising guest appearance by the punk-rock pioneer Iggy Pop on two tracks, the vintage R&B ballad “Why Can’t We Live Together” and Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.”In addition to Ms. Case, Mr. Smith is survived by four daughters, Lani Chambers, Chandra Thomas, Charisse Partridge and Vonnie Smith, and several grandchildren.In 2017 the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for a jazz musician.“A lot of musicians get into music because they want to be rich, famous or all of the above,” Mr. Smith said in a 2012 interview. “You are already rich once you sit down and learn to play. That’s richness in itself.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

Britney Spears’s conservatorship hearing — the first in the case since July — has gotten underway. The New York Times has reporters in the courtroom and will update as soon as there are developments.Her fans began arriving more than hour before its scheduled start, but Ms. Spears is not expected at the hearing, presided over by Judge Brenda Penny at a courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. As conservatee, Ms. Spears is not required to appear at the regular status hearings in the long-running case and has typically chosen not to. She did attend the June 23 hearing, when she spoke publicly at length for the first time about the conservatorship, calling it abusive and calling for it to end without a psychiatric evaluation. But even in that instance she appeared remotely.Unlike that hearing, during which live audio from the courtroom was available online to account for coronavirus protocols, today’s hearing will not be publicly accessible via stream. (In addition to shifting Covid-19 precautions, Judge Penny expressed dismay at audio of Ms. Spears’s testimony being shared online, despite her orders against recording it.) Limited members of the public and the press have been allowed to attend in person.The lawyers on the case — often in the double-digits, thanks to the number of parties now involved — may attend in person or remotely by video call or phone, as can their clients, including Lynne and James Spears, the singer’s parents.Despite the fact that some of the lawyers involved, including those for Ms. Spears’s father, are arguing against her stated wishes, the legal bills for the case are generally charged to Ms. Spears’s estate. Representatives for the singer and her mother have raised this issue with the court, calling some of the fees excessive.Just one of the lawyers who has been involved in the case, Samuel D. Ingham III, Ms. Spears’s court-appointed counsel who was replaced in July, earned more than $3 million in the 13 years he represented her. Ms. Spears is not known to have questioned Mr. Ingham’s fees. More

The company is performing the terse, original 1869 version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” for the first time.You may have heard about the widely publicized landmark with which the Metropolitan Opera opened its season on Monday: Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” its first work by a Black composer. Flying under the radar is the less momentous but still significant milestone that followed on Tuesday, when the company finally performed the original 1869 version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.”Opera is littered with competing editions and unclear authorial intentions. Does the Giulietta act go before or after the Antonia act in “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”? Do you sing Verdi’s masterpiece in Italian as “Don Carlo,” or — as the Met will do for the first time in its history late this winter — in the original French, as “Don Carlos”?But probably no major work is as vexed as “Boris Godunov.” Mussorgsky had never written an opera when he created this often brusque, raw, darkly sober, oddly spare score about a troubled czar and his troubled country. We’re not entirely sure why it was rejected by the imperial theater directorate, but the main reason may have been a banal one: The piece lacked a major female character.The scene of Boris’s coronation as czar in this revival of the Met’s spare production, new in 2010.Richard Termine for The New York TimesSo Mussorgsky gamely (perhaps even happily) revised, adding material — including Marina, a leading lady of sorts — and taking chunks out; a version of that version premiered in 1874. Then, after Mussorgsky’s death, his friend Rimsky-Korsakov took it upon himself to reorchestrate, rejigger and sometimes recompose the work to make it more colorful and less idiosyncratic. This seems scandalous to us, but without Rimsky “Boris” would never have entered the international repertory early in the 20th century.Over the past 50 years or so, as part of a general vogue for presenting art as its creators envisioned, Rimsky’s glittering interventions fell from grace in favor of Mussorgsky’s starker orchestrations. But his revised, post-1869 version has remained the norm. Or, more precisely, an amalgam: The available options have served as a kind of grab bag, with scenes and passages kept or left out at will, and ordered in various sequences. (That all this is possible speaks to how strange and episodic the work is, as well as to how compelling it remains in almost any form.)It was therefore not unusual that, when the Met’s current production premiered in 2010, it could contain, among other choices, both the act set in Poland (from Mussorgsky’s revised version) and the scene at the Cathedral of St. Basil, which had been cut after 1869. This was a sprawling, two-intermission affair of almost four and a half hours.Maxim Paster, center, and Aleksey Bogdanov, just left behind him, are two of several singers making their Met debuts in this production.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe 1869 version, still a rarity, runs about half that, in a single act of seven scenes presented at the Met without intermission. (The edition being performed is by Michael Rot.) This is by no means an abbreviated “Boris.” But conducted with cool, efficient clarity and seriousness by Sebastian Weigle, it is certainly a lithe evening, a sour shot of a demanding, easily manipulated populace and the leader that the crowd alternately acclaims and reviles: the title character, privately tormented by guilt at having come to power by murdering the 8-year-old heir to the throne.Lithe, too, is the Met’s nearly set-less staging, which the director, Stephen Wadsworth, took on at the last minute back in 2010 and which works well in this version, allowing for fluid scene changes and reflecting the austerity of Mussorgsky’s original vision. His orchestra acts not as a Wagner-style character in its own right, nor as an melodic interlocutor. (There aren’t many melodies.) Instead, it serves as a propelling undercurrent and atmosphere for exposed vocal lines tailored to the rhythms of Russian speech — anticipating Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” which borrows audibly from “Boris,” and Janacek. Adroitly handled, the technique allows the opera to be talky while flowing ever forward.And this was a cast of sonorous, articulate singing talkers, led by the production’s star from 2010, the bass René Pape, his voice as burnished and secure as ever as Boris. If Pape’s tonal pleasures have often seemed to come at the expense of vivid characterizations — as in his beautiful, bland Gurnemanz in Wagner’s “Parsifal” — he fits the restraint of this conductor, chorus and production.This staging is the occasion for several accomplished Met debuts: the bass Ain Anger, commanding as the monk Pimen, who predicts Boris’s downfall; the tenor David Butt Philip, bright yet brooding as Grigory, who proclaims himself Dmitry, the believed-to-have-been-killed rightful heir to the throne; the baritone Aleksey Bogdanov, firm and forthright as the nobleman Shchelkalov; and the tenor Maxim Paster, bronze-toned and cynical as Prince Shuisky.David Butt Philip (left, against wall) plays a monk pretending to be the heir to the Russian throne who falls in with Varlaam (Ryan Speedo Green, arm raised), a vagrant monk.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, the best singer in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” has equally rich, unforced power here as the drunken monk Varlaam. The mezzo-soprano Tichina Vaughn, as a piquant inn hostess, and the tenor Miles Mykkanen, as the plangent Holy Fool who haunts Boris, are both excellent.Should we prefer the 1869 original? I actually find the revised version’s ending — the angry mob, bent on revolution, is yet again flipped into cowed fervor, this time by the false Dmitry — to be more effective and haunting than the curtain falling on Boris’s death, particularly in Pape’s all too mellow performance here. But I don’t miss the Polish act, which has always seemed a bit out of place in its deployment of operatic conventions. And the work’s general pessimism seems better suited to its original terseness than to more epic scale.My answer — today, at least — is yes.Boris GodunovThrough Oct. 17 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

A judge may take up whether her father should be ousted as her conservator, and whether the arrangement should be ended entirely.[Follow live updates on Britney Spears’s conservatorship hearing.]Some changes have come quickly in the three months since Britney Spears spoke up publicly for the first time about the conservatorship that has overseen her life for more than 13 years, calling the arrangement abusive and exploitative at a hearing on June 23.For the first time in the case, Ms. Spears, 39, was allowed to hire her own lawyer, replacing a court-appointed one. A bank that was set to begin managing the singer’s money, alongside her father, resigned, as did her longtime manager. And Ms. Spears, who said she believed the conservatorship would prevent her from getting married or having a baby, got engaged to her boyfriend, Sam Asghari.But other changes Ms. Spears has been seeking to the conservatorship — in some cases for many years — remain open questions as the case returns to a Los Angeles courtroom for its latest status hearing.Ms. Spears’s new lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, doubled down in recent weeks on his attempts to remove the singer’s father, James P. Spears, as the conservator of her estate, calling him actively harmful to her well-being and asking for further investigation into Mr. Spears’s conduct. Mr. Rosengart has said in court documents that he will move to terminate the conservatorship entirely this fall.Yet even as Mr. Spears, 69, reversed course this summer, agreeing to step aside eventually before filing to end the conservatorship altogether earlier this month, he has continued to push back against his immediate suspension or removal.These are some of the questions that could be decided by the probate judge in the case, Brenda Penny, on Wednesday. The hearing is set to begin at 4:30 p.m. ET.Will the Conservatorship Be Terminated Altogether?At this point, Ms. Spears has not officially filed to end the conservatorship. In a twist this month, lawyers for Mr. Spears, who had long maintained that the conservatorship was voluntary and necessary, did file to end it, citing the singer’s stated wishes and recent shows of independence. But experts have said that terminating a conservatorship without a medical evaluation — as Ms. Spears and now her father have asked for — is unlikely, and there is no public record of the judge calling for a psychiatric evaluation recently. (In 2016, according to confidential documents obtained by The New York Times, a court investigator said the conservatorship remained in Ms. Spears’s best interest despite her requests to end it, but called for a path to independence.)Mr. Rosengart has called Mr. Spears’s attempt to terminate the arrangement “vindication” for Ms. Spears, but suggested that the singer’s father was attempting to “avoid accountability and justice, including sitting for a sworn deposition and answering other discovery under oath” by filing to end it.In a filing last week, Mr. Rosengart said that Ms. Spears “fully consents” to terminating the conservatorship and said that Ms. Spears’s personal conservator since 2019, Jodi Montgomery, backed it as well, “subject to proper transition and asset protection.” But he called for “a temporary, short-term conservator to replace Mr. Spears’s until the conservatorship is completely and inevitably terminated this fall.”Will Jamie Spears Be Removed as Conservator?“While the entire conservatorship is promptly wound down and formally terminated, it is clear that Mr. Spears cannot be permitted to hold a position of control over his daughter for another day,” Mr. Rosengart wrote in his filing last week. “Every day Mr. Spears clings to his post is another day of anguish and harm to his daughter.”Ms. Spears’s lawyer has moved to replace her father on a temporary basis with John Zabel, a certified public accountant in California who has worked in Hollywood.Yet Mr. Spears maintained in filings this week that while there is “no adequate basis” for his suspension or removal as conservator of the estate, the court should instead focus on terminating the conservatorship — something that is “opposed by no one” and should take priority. (Lawyers for Mr. Spears contend that in 13 years, “not a single medical professional nor the report of a single probate investigator has recommended that Mr. Spears’ presence as Conservator was harming Ms. Spears.”) Ending the conservatorship, Mr. Spears’s lawyers wrote, “would render some of the other pending matters moot” and “would provide an incentive for the resolution of all other matters.”At the same time, Mr. Spears’s lawyers also argued that Mr. Zabel “does not appear to have the background and experience required to take over a complex, $60 million” estate immediately, pointing to Mr. Zabel’s personal losses in a real estate investment. Mr. Rosengart countered on Tuesday that Mr. Spears has “zero financial background,” a previous bankruptcy and faces allegations of abuse.Will Mr. Spears and Others Be Investigated Further?Following Ms. Spears’s comments in June — in which she said she had been forced to take medication and was unable to remove a birth-control device — her father asked the court to investigate the claims, denying his own culpability and instead calling into question the actions of Ms. Montgomery, the singer’s current personal conservator, and others.Mr. Rosengart has since asked for a future hearing on outstanding financial issues involving the conservatorship, calling mismanagement of Ms. Spears’s estate by her father “evident and ongoing.” He said that Mr. Spears had been served a request for discovery and a sworn deposition in August, before he filed to end the conservatorship.So far, the judge has not addressed potential investigations, and additional financial matters — including disputed fees for various lawyers in the case and accounting for the conservatorship covering 2019 — remain outstanding. In their filing this week, lawyers for Mr. Spears said that “all pending issues could be resolved” if the judge called for a mandatory settlement conference of private mediation.“The last thing this Court or this Conservatee needs or wants would be extended and expensive litigation over pending or final accounts and fee petitions,” they wrote.Will Recent Revelations Be Addressed?Since the last hearing in July, three documentaries about the Spears conservatorship have been released, in addition to related reporting on the case. “Controlling Britney Spears,” the second documentary on the subject by The New York Times, revealed that an intense surveillance apparatus monitored the singer, including secretly capturing audio recordings from her bedroom and accessing material from her phone.Recording conversations in a private place and mirroring text messages without the consent of both parties can be a violation of the law. It is unclear if the court overseeing Ms. Spears’s conservatorship approved the surveillance or knew of its existence. Ms. Spears’s lawyer called for an investigation, writing in a court filing on Tuesday that Mr. Spears “crossed unfathomable lines,” further supporting the need to suspend him immediately.A Netflix film, “Britney Vs. Spears,” reported that Ms. Spears sought to end the conservatorship beginning in 2008 and 2009, raising concerns about her father’s fitness for the role, the money she was making for others and threats involving custody of her children. Documents obtained by the filmmakers also showed that Ms. Spears’s access to medication she liked increased when she worked, including during a stint as a judge on “The X-Factor” in 2012. More

Sarah Tudzin started this Los Angeles band to show off her production work and find new clients. It turned into an outlet for her razor-sharp reflections on modern life.LOS ANGELES — The night before Sarah Tudzin filmed the music video for the first single from her band Illuminati Hotties’ new album, the director Katie Neuhof texted a picture of green, gelatinous glop cooking on her stove. In the middle of the clip for the exuberantly titled “Mmmoooaaaaayaya,” it was to be poured, Nickelodeon-style, onto Tudzin’s head.“Oh yeah, what’s in it?” Tudzin, the band’s 29-year-old founder and frontperson, replied. “I’m allergic to dairy, by the way!” This was news. An emergency scan of the ingredients in Jell-O vanilla pudding powder, green food dye and applesauce confirmed that the slime was, in fact, lactose free. Then, Tudzin recalled gamely, “I was all set.”“Mmmoooaaaaayaya” is the second track on Illuminati Hotties’ thrillingly genre-defiant album “Let Me Do One More,” out Friday. Releasing it as the first single, Tudzin said, “I wanted to smack people over the head with something off-kilter.” The song’s verses are a teetering Jenga tower of dissonant guitar stabs and Dada-esque reflections on modern life (“You think I wanna be a part of every self-appointed start-up?”), then the chorus snaps into one of the catchiest hooks you’ve heard in ages — a kind of wordless, subversively goofy primal scream into the void.“She can make any sound she wants,” the singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus, Tudzin’s friend and former tour mate, said in a phone interview. “She has the full breadth of emotion in her music: You may be coming into a party but then, whoops! You’re feeling things. I like that she never keeps you too long in one state of mind.”Tudzin, a recording engineer and producer who been releasing music as Illuminati Hotties since 2018, has “invented her own genre,” said the producer Chris Coady, who employed her in his studio for several years. Tudzin’s name for it: “tenderpunk.”“Let Me Do One More” is a creative leap that embraces new sounds and song forms and seems destined to increase the ranks of her fans (she calls them Little Shredders). Its release on the indie label Hopeless Records also represents a professional triumph. In May 2018, Illuminati Hotties signed with the Tiny Engines label and released its debut album, “Kiss Yr Frenemies.” In 2019, several of the label’s artists accused its leaders of financial mismanagement. Tudzin still owed one more album on her contract, but didn’t want her proudest artistic achievement yet to arrive on the embattled label. So, in a few whirlwind weeks that winter, she wrote and tracked a blistering, 23-minute LP to fulfill her commitment. She classified it as a mixtape, and gave it a cheeky title: “Free I.H.: This Is Not the One You’ve Been Waiting For.”“I’m always looking for ways to tie the global picture into a personal narrative,” Tudzin said.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesMusicians have a long, storied history of quickly tossing off albums to get out of restrictive record contracts. Most of these albums are awful. “Free I.H.,” almost by accident, was quite good, summoning both the sugary power-pop hooks of prime-era Weezer and the wild punk-rock eclecticism of the Minutemen. Lyrically, Tudzin has a knack for articulating how hard it can be to form authentic human relationships in a world clotted with the detritus of an increasingly absurd consumer culture. “Let’s smash to a podcast,” she shouts on the mixtape’s first song. “Tomorrow morning we’re crying into a Denny’s Grand Slam.”Tudzin kicks all these elements up a notch on “Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism,” one of the most affecting songs on “Let Me Do One More.” A slow-burning ballad propelled by crushing guitars, the song strikes a signature balance between humor and pathos.“I’m always looking for ways to tie the global picture into a personal narrative,” Tudzin explained. “I think that’s what’s helped me connect universally and also connect with other people, person to person.”Tudzin grew up in the Valley, but Downtown Los Angeles, where we met at a library in August, brings back memories of her teen years going to shows at the nearby all-ages venue the Smell. (We wandered into the library after the nearby bookstore we intended to browse was closed for a film shoot — a modern irony that wouldn’t be out of place in an Illuminati Hotties song.) She took piano and drum lessons from a young age, and was adequately schooled in classical and jazz, but something clicked around age 10 when her drum teacher taught her that she could play along with whatever records she was listening to in her spare time.“I asked a friend of mine to burn me some CDs, and she lent me some Green Day and some Blink-182,” Tudzin said. “And then it was like, game over.”After graduating from the rigorous production program at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, Tudzin was dismayed to find that she was expected to cut her teeth as a “runner” — fetching coffee and cleaning toilets into the wee hours — for several years before she would be able to use the technical skills she’d learned in college.“It was a really bad environment,” she said of her time working at a major-label studio. She quit after six weeks and shopped her résumé all over Los Angeles, eventually hustling her way into an assistant job with the producer Will Wells (the “Hamilton” cast recording was among the projects they worked on) and, later, with her mentor Coady, who was instantly impressed by Tudzin’s chops.“We were up and running on Day 1 — she already knew ProTools better than I did,” Coady said. In the three years they worked together, “Sarah never made one single mistake,” he said. “I was lucky, because people that good usually don’t stick around for long.”Tudzin hopes to split her time as a musician and a producer, as she attempts to make her own little corner of the music industry a more humane place to work. Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesDuring that time, Tudzin started Illuminati Hotties as more of an aspiring producer’s calling card than an actual band: “I was like, how do I convince some band that I meet at a show that I’m able to make their record? One of the ways was to make my own record, and be like, ‘This is me going all out.’”Tudzin was going to just upload “Kiss Yr Frenemies” onto Bandcamp and move on, but Dacus convinced her to “respect your own work enough to give it the breathing space that it deserves,” Dacus said. Which meant sending it out to labels. Tiny Engines offered to put it out. The sudden recognition was a thrill but, in retrospect, Tudzin regrets not reading her contract more carefully — especially the part where she signed away her masters.If Taylor Swift “can be fooled with all that team around her, imagine a small band who just plays local shows and has never done this before,” Tudzin said in the library cafe as we sipped iced coffees.One silver lining of Tudzin’s contract debacle is that her new deal has allowed her to create and co-release “Let Me Do One More” on her own imprint, Snack Shack Records. She hopes to sign a roster of indie bands she likes and ensure that they don’t make the same mistakes she did.In late 2018, the demands of Illuminati Hotties pushed her to “graduate” (Coady’s word) from her role as a studio assistant and engineer, but during the pandemic Tudzin was able to take on remote production jobs and stay afloat a bit more easily than musicians who relied solely on touring. Though any increased attention that “Let Me Do One More” brings will likely make her balancing act a bit more precarious, Tudzin hopes to split her upcoming time as a musician and a producer, as she attempts to make her own little corner of the music industry a more humane place to work. Just as long as she’s still enjoying herself.“I just want to make it fun for me, and I’m happy to have as many people on board for that as want to be a part of it,” she said. “It definitely makes it more fun, to create the space that I want to be in.” More