It’s still Empress Of’s ‘single era’ summer
The Honduran-American singer and musician Empress Of is done waiting for the world to catch up. On her latest album, For Your Consideration, she’s directing her own sensual, over-the-top fantasy in which she’s the main character
Lorely Rodriguez knew she wanted the artwork for her latest album, For Your Consideration, to be her main character moment. In a golden veneer, she straddles a neon-lit shooting star clad in a windswept silky dress, overlooking Hollywood’s night sky – a camp homage to David LaChapelle’s early 2000s photography. “Everything’s really glam, which I feel is just different from what’s happening in pop culture today,” she says on a call from Los Angeles.
This embrace of Hollywood glamour and artifice is a nod to the theme sweeping through her latest album as Empress Of. Growing up in Los Angeles, Rodriguez was surrounded by the entertainment industry. “‘For your consideration’ is a thing you see everywhere,” she says of the campaigns directed at voters ahead of awards season. “When someone starts their FYC campaign, [you know] they want to be considered for the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys.”
Rodriguez thought using this industry phrase would be a cheeky nod to that world of all-consuming achievement, but there was also a more personal reason for clinging to it. “I had a little romance with a director and he was doing his FYCs for the Oscars, and I was like, ‘You will consider me,’” she giggles. Her relationship with the idea of Hollywood – or fame – isn’t something she takes too seriously, though. In fact, she thinks it’s all a bit “silly”, if not without a certain ersatz allure. “Hollywood doesn’t feel like it should be real,” she reflects. Indeed, for Rodriguez, the fantasy of any given thing is perhaps better than the reality. “I want to be a fantasy for myself and for my fans,” she explains.
That fantasy is, at times, sticky and dripping sweat – as on Sucia when Rodriguez breathlessly muses about oral sex: “I can’t keep clean when your face is between/ Cuando estás entre mis piernas.” For Your Consideration is Rodriguez’s “hot and horny” era, steeped in lascivious pop pleasure; emanating joy rather than stewing in heartbreak. “It’s fun and lighter than the other [albums] as far as the theme goes,” she notes. The album title, she says, felt “appropriate”; a way for her to pitch her own journey of sexual healing while taking an unrestrained approach to her songwriting and production palette; ASMR-influenced beats blending with bilingual dance-pop.
“I want to be overrated. I am aspiring to be overrated”
For someone who has been navigating the music industry for more than 13 years, this feeling of liberation is well-earned. The Honduran-American singer first grabbed our attention in 2012 with a series of dreamy, colour-coded YouTube demos called Colorminutes, which she uploaded anonymously, before sharing a pair of EPs – Systems and Tristeza – in the years following. It wasn’t until 2015, though, that she dropped her intensely personal, avant-R&B debut. Zig-zagging through finger snaps and asymmetrical dance beats tackling doomed romance and the intense isolation that consumed her during a sojourn to Mexico, Me turned her into a critical darling. Three years later, with a growing following to satisfy, she crafted Us. A more palatable pop album, Us harnesses Rodriguez’s signature dreaminess and cools down her more eccentric flourishes and florid lyrical approach.
With her third studio album, 2020’s I’m Your Empress Of, she embraced Chicago house and funkified pop. “I don’t really repeat records,” Rodriguez says. “All my records are quite different.” That’s partly down to her impulse to avoid repetition, and partly her decision to switch from producing herself (on records like Me) to embracing a roster of co-producers. Us features Dev Hynes and DJDS, while I’m Your Empress Of includes BJ Burton and Jim-E Stack. The balance of the diaristic nature of her work and the playfulness of her chaotic melodies (think: bell tones and jilted synths) also helped her land slots supporting Carly Rae Jepsen and Rina Sawayama.
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On For Your Consideration, Rodriguez – now 34 – once again embraces her penchant for chameleon-like experimentation. Her latest project is a procession of sensual synth-pop strutters, intimate ballads and shoegaze-y serenades. She celebrates one-night stands over intoxicating samba and evokes the eroticism of the dancefoor with glitchy electro-pop, alongside producers like Billboard (Robyn, Ariana Grande) and Umru (Charli XCX). For Rodriguez, this fourth studio LP captures a “new emotion” that ultimately “feels very ‘single era.’” Expanding on this, she says: “There’s a lot of dom assertive energy, but then there’s submissive vibes as well,” she notes.
The album’s glitchy title track sets the saucy tone, opening with syncopated orgasmic breaths before Rodriguez croons, “You said I felt like home/ I let you inside.” With Lorelei, a play on her own name (“everyone always thinks that’s my name”), she crafts her own Jolene – except she’s the other woman.
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“I was seeing someone and I found out they had a girlfriend, and I was the other girl,” she recalls, before insisting, “but I didn’t know that.” Rodriguez says she “felt so bad for the other girl” that she wanted to write a song from her perspective. “I was in the studio singing, ‘Does she know how much she makes me cry? And I was like, ‘What rhymes with cry? Lorelei.’”
For Your Consideration also gave Rodriguez the chance to write more songs in Spanish than ever before. In Spanish, she’s able to channel her more sexual side. The pulsating club-ready Fácil gets straight to the pleasure from the get go: “Yo soy fácil, yo soy fácil/ Fácil de comer, fácil de amar,” (“I am easy, I am easy/ Easy to eat, easy to love”). On Preciosa, flanked by breathy beatboxing production, Rodriguez sings what translates to “I’m like a doll.” “It’s like being a ‘baby girl,’” she explains. “I just feel sexy when I sing that song.”
To help build out this distinctive, sensual world, Rodriguez has recruited a select crew of collaborators. She worked with Sawayama for the 2000s pop-inspired Kiss Me – which is steeped in all-consuming infatuation – after opening for her on tour. “It is really diva energy,” Rodriguez says of their combined vocals. Reflecting on the team-up with MUNA for the album’s closer, What’s Love, Rodriguez is equally effusive. “I feel like our voices sound sick together… sickening,” she asserts. But Rodriguez has far from exhausted her wishlist. She longs to work with Robyn and Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins. Fraser had a renowned, dreamy number called Lorelei – perhaps it’s kismet. “If there’s a moment for us to make some music together, I would cherish it,” she said. “Those are my two girls.”
Like so many who’ve nurtured the seam where art and pop coalesce, Rodriguez’s has done it from the vantage point of cult favourite, beloved by her fans but arguably underrated in the wider cultural landscape. She is overjoyed that this is beginning to change, and gushes over the success of artists like Tinashe (“I always respected her for just being authentic”), Charli XCX (“Her release made me and some of my friends really emotional”) and Chappell Roan (“She has been grinding”). Rodriguez beams with pride as she notes how thrilled she is that they are all “getting their flowers.”
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Unsurprisingly, she seems energised by seeing her peers enjoy success that is hard-won. Refreshingly, at this point in her career, she doesn’t try to feign being humble. She’s confident in her craft, she knows she’s underrated – and she knows what she wants. “I want to be overrated,” she declares with a wink. “I am aspiring to be overrated.”
This pitch for success and recognition leads us back to the title of her album. Of course Rodriguez dreams of winning a Grammy, who doesn’t? But she also knows they’re a double-edged sword. “Those things hold value, but they also don’t hold value, because some of our favourite artists never win Grammys,” she says. The art that matters rarely ever takes the gong. So For Your Consideration isn’t competing for a golden statue. There’s no need: “This record is already a prize-winner in my eyes… I am the prize.”
For Your Consideration is out now
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