Empress Of Is Where She Wants To Be

Lorely Rodriguez, aka Empress Of, is feeling pensive, an unsurprising response when someone finally takes a pause during a cascade of output. It’s the start of summer, and her latest album For Your Consideration, replete with pop and dance songs that match the surge of energy that comes with the season, has been out for about eight weeks. It’s been met with positive reviews, the concurrent press circuit, and sold-out concerts; she’s now in New York in the middle of a short run of club shows ahead of a wider headlining world tour this fall. She’s coming off the first night of a string of performances at Elsewhere, an intimate show for roughly 250 people, and the experience is contextualizing some questions that presumably have been simmering within her for some time now. With the music industry changing so much, what is most valuable to the artist? What does success mean to her at all?

“Putting out music today is so different than putting it out four years ago,” she says. “It’s so different than putting it out two years ago: the speed in which people consume things, the way fans learn about something, engage with something. Everyone’s afraid of the algorithm.” It’s a new struggle for artists who, save for the anomalies—from the TikTok omnipresence of PinkPantheress to the build up of Charli XCX’s Brat and the subsequent ubiquity of lime green backgrounds—are vying for attention as much as they are making music and touring, and failure to do so can stunt the viability of artistic pursuit. “I see it with myself, I see it with other artists, just watching our friends and how they promote records or how they engage with their fans,” Rodriguez continues. “So it’s been interesting, as a still somewhat undiscovered artist who has been at it for like ten years.”

While she isn’t abandoning digital engagement any time soon, Rodriguez is celebrating a newfound joy and solace in the closeness of community. “My philosophy right now is I need to be in the room with people,” she says. “It is so nice to be in front of real people, to sit here on this bench with you in Washington Square Park and be with real people, because that is engagement. You’re not going to get that from some clickbaity posts.” At one point during one of the shows at Elsewhere, the mic cut out, and it was just her and the crowd. She quietly stood there for a second, before the crowd called out asking her about the album, a reminder that people actually want to know more and hear it from her first. “I just want people to get the whole picture of what this record is, who I am, where I am right now,” she adds. “One post only gets so much engagement. One TikTok only gets so much engagement, but when you live with someone and you see them in person, that memory just feels more lasting.”

When she tours this fall, the venues will be larger, but For Your Consideration, her fourth album and the first she’s released on her own Major Arcana label along with Giant Music, has such energy that it’s bound to create an experience for those in attendance. “I wrote them in Miami after going to strip clubs and the beach, so that energy is there,” she explains. “It’s that energy of feeling hot, wanting to feel hot, seeing attractive people around me, just being desired, being playful. I feel like I tapped into that on this record more than the other records.”

Another first for the album: She gave up the reins of production, which she typically does herself, giving her more room to play with her vocals. “There’s lots of vocal ASMR breathing, nods to Bjork’s Medúlla record or Imogen Heap or Caroline Shaw,” she says, referring to the vocal pulses that feature right from the opening seconds of the album. The sounds also vary throughout the album’s 32-minute runtime; “Kiss Me” with Rina Sawayama proudly carries the torch of Y2K-era pop, “Femenine” layers Spanish lyrics about dominance and gender role reversal over a house beat, and “Baby Boy” maintains the album’s tempo but brings in an acoustic guitar. “This record I was like, ‘I am tired of not having fun while making music,’” she recalls, determined to avoid songs about heartbreak. “I wanted to make indulgent pop songs.”

With each album, Rodriguez is expressing who she is in a moment, and the tone of For Your Consideration conveys her attitude clearly. “I feel very confident in who I am, what I want,” she says. “It comes with age. I’m thirty-four years old. I have these conversations with people of all levels, business relationships, and you kind of know your worth. I know what I'm okay with saying no to, what I'm okay with saying yes to.” The forthright lyrics and overt themes about flirtiness, sex, and empowerment only help to reflect that broader sense of self: “I feel like this record is confidence. I’ve said it about my other records before, but because I’m thinking about sensuality overtly, it just feels very confident to me and very…me.”

The title itself pokes fun at the constant desire for success that people strive for, especially in Hollywood, which gets plastered with ‘For Your Consideration’ signs during awards season. While other pop stars have parodied their celebrity, Rodriguez wanted to poke fun at the absurdity of it all—of even wanting fame to begin with—but that also challenges her own notions of success as an artist. She’s now released four acclaimed albums, worked with exciting musicians like Sawayama, Blood Orange, and Shygirl, and performed all over the world. By most people’s estimation, she’s wildly successful, but the sense remains that she’s still being discovered. “I woke up one day and I was like, ‘I am so privileged to be doing music, but I’ve been at this, I’m working really hard, and even my fans [are] saying, “I’m gatekeeping you,”’” she says. “And I’m like, ‘Don’t do that!’ My therapist was like, ‘It doesn’t matter if you get the thing that you say you want, I don’t think that’s going to make you happy. You have to be happy with yourself first.’”

Rodriguez firmly believes that, and after a decade of working in music, she’s considering the same questions that were first presented to her with music-business types: Who do you want to be? How famous do you want to be? “I think there are toxic ways to think about it and there are aspirational ways to think about it,” she offers. “For me, I just want my music to touch as many people as possible. I'm going to just say that because I think that’s not toxic. I want my music to touch as many people as possible, but that has to come from me.”

That’s why she’s been so conscious of the more tangible parts of her profession—from meeting fans at a show to having the experiences that translate to songs to begin with—the parts that aren’t captured in an Instagram comment section, or found in a viral marketing campaign or the fleeting high that comes from a successful awards campaign. “That’s the crux of the thing, that’s what I try to go back to,” she says. “I talk to all my friends about this, we’re like, ‘Remember when we used to just make music in our bedrooms? And we used to just be weird?’ You didn’t think about the promo, you didn’t think about the tours or any of that. You just made a song and you listened to it for eight hours straight, like, ‘Oh my god, this is so sick!’ I want that feeling. There are moments when I get it, but I want to connect with that feeling more, that feeling of the joy of creation.”

For Your Consideration is out now. Empress Of continues her European tour tonight at Botanique, Brussels. See this story and many more in print by ordering our eighth issue here.