After a Year Without Crowds, Caroline Polachek Takes the Stage

Harle, who describes Polachek as “one of the best producers I’ve ever met,” has, like her, an odd and eclectic mix of influences. His music often sounds like a heart attack happening inside a rainbow-colored Nintendo game, but, when I asked him what he likes to listen to, he sent me a fourteenth-century French lamentation. He suggested that the intensity of his and Polachek’s individual visions is what makes the collaboration work: “Instead of a clash between our identities, or an overcomplication, it’s a synthesis, a mutual amplification of aesthetics we both think of as ideal.” Polachek said that when they started writing together Harle had these “big, sawing trance synths, but with medieval chord progressions, and I wrote this twisty, asymmetrical, non-repeating melody over it, and it sounded like nothing either of us had ever heard, but a kind of sound we’d both always been after.”

Polachek, emboldened, began conceiving of the record that she would release under her own name. At the same time, she started experiencing inexplicable adrenaline rushes—her heart would take off racing when she was getting ready for bed, or sitting down to dinner. Her marriage was breaking up; she and Drennan divorced in 2017. “My mother very much disapproved, and my friend group was sort of split by it,” Polachek said. She moved into a friend’s temporarily vacant apartment. She felt fragile, and struggled with jealousy about other artists’ positions in the industry; she wondered if her early thirties was a little late to be starting a project as a pop musician. “But I was feverishly compelled by the music, and in love with it,” she said. She pushed herself to write about the breakup of her relationship and the beginning of a new one, with Copson, and not to retreat into abstraction. She set up a studio next to her bed, and often worked until the sun came up.

During one shaky, sunrise moment, she seized on the word “pang” to describe what was happening in her body: a burst of desperate longing, a need for change and flight. The album that she produced was crystalline, baroque, off-kilter—a pop record that includes a track in 7/4 time. On the song “New Normal,” which has no chorus, the key changes braid back on one another like stairways in an Escher print. There were lumps of sing-along sugar, too, like the Lorde-esque track “Hit Me Where It Hurts,” and startling moments of virtuosic vocal performance: despite her commitment to contemporary synth pop, Polachek still occasionally goes full Sarah Brightman. Critics praised the coherence and the specificity of the album’s vision, even as it ranged, track by track, into a motley array of genres: indie folk, adult contemporary, modern classical, early-two-thousands-style R. & B. Polachek had a limited budget for her live shows—she could pay for either a band or a huge painted backdrop, and she chose the backdrop. She toured the album in small clubs, then bigger ones. She made it through fifteen sets before everything shut down.

In May, 2020, not long after her father died, Polachek found herself lying awake at four in the morning. She was still in London, living with Copson at his place in Notting Hill. Her six-inch stage heels were packed away in a closet. Polachek, with her feel for self-presentation and her meticulously tuned mix of earnestness and irony, is a very Internet-friendly artist, but in lockdown she found the digital world alienating. Social media was “so focussed on morality from every possible angle,” she said. It felt dishonest to her. “Nobody is innocent,” she went on. Destruction was everywhere—in the virus; in the long, cyclical history of plague; in the supply chains that brought fruit across the world to the grocery store. She became obsessed with a faked Marianne Williamson tweet, Photoshopped to say “Everything we want will require unfathomable violence.” She told me, “I started thinking about how to re-harmonize myself, and my music, with the reality that there is a destructive side to everything, with the recognition that you are mortal, that you cannot save the world, that there are greater forces that you submit to.”

That night, Copson told her to get up and put on her bike helmet. “He took me biking to Buckingham Palace, and we didn’t pass a single car on the road,” she recalled. “It was like being Peter Pan or something—flying through Piccadilly Circus with not a single person around and all the shop lights still glittering, and we were drawing zigzags down the center of the road, big swooping shapes, like little kids.” The cognitive dissonance of the moment—the joy, the fear, the sadness—was beautiful and overwhelming. Unusually, for Polachek, she didn’t try to write about it. Individual experience seemed strangely irrelevant in the context of the pandemic, at once too isolated and too commonplace.

She began settling into a life that felt quiet and Victorian, revolving around daily outings to Hyde Park. “I’d never gotten to see the same tree every day, because as a musician I was always travelling so much,” she said. “But getting to measure time in that way was poetic. To see, Oh, the leaves have changed shape, now they’ve changed color, now the flowers are dying, now it’s the fullness of summer.” She had booked the biggest shows of her solo career for the summer of 2020: Glastonbury, in England; Primavera Sound, in Barcelona; Outside Lands, in San Francisco. They were all cancelled. “I always have a feeling of disbelief that I get to do this for a living,” she told me. “It always feels like a magic spell that will break at any moment. So I had this feeling that of course the shows got pulled away from me, because that was never going to happen in the first place. There was no way that that was actually real.”

In July, a friend invited Polachek and Copson to visit him in Rome. Italy’s lockdown had been eased, and they spent hours driving around in their friend’s beat-up station wagon with the windows down, listening to Italian pop from the seventies and eighties. There was a righteous simplicity in the chesty, vibrato-heavy singing that blared from the car’s old speakers, Polachek thought. They returned to London after a couple of weeks. “I could still feel that dizzying heat and feral beauty of the Mediterranean rattling around inside me,” she recalled. “Pang” had told the story of her divorce and what came after, but any kind of cinematic, well-constructed narrative seemed blown apart by the pandemic. She felt averse to a dominant paradigm in contemporary pop songwriting that is sometimes associated with Julia Michaels, who co-wrote “Sorry” for Justin Bieber and “Lose You to Love Me” for Selena Gomez—the “cliché of the big chorus and the snap-drop down to verse two,” as Polachek put it. She wanted something different. She was thinking about the structures and dynamics of dance music and hip-hop, and about how she could conjure a sense of “coasting, or sailing, or flowing.” One day, Harle sent her a beat that he’d written, and Polachek heard a melody out of nowhere, oceanic and potent, and started jotting down psychedelic images: a headless angel, an overflowing cup, a pearl inside an oyster. The beat and the images became the song “Billions.” She told me, “I wanted something that captured the afterglow of a reopening.”

She returned to Italy later in the summer, with a few friends. They rented an Airbnb at the base of Mt. Etna, which had begun erupting around the onset of the pandemic. “I’d go out at night, and you could see the red lava glowing for miles and miles against the night sky, and it felt like the most beautiful visual metaphor for what I was going through—feeling this inexplicable, wordless, faceless, tectonic, chaotic energy coming up from below,” she said. In the afternoons, while her friends went to the beach, she stayed in the house, “in a stained cotton dress, barefoot, wearing headphones, working with the windows open.”

Back in England, Polachek began a residency at Laylow, a West London club with a studio. Then COVID spiked again, and in November the U.K. government instituted another lockdown. The club’s owners “closed the entire building, gave me a key, and told me to hang on to the studio for as long as I wanted,” Polachek said. She kept it for more than three months, writing songs, burning incense, watching music videos on YouTube. As the bleak winter softened, she thought about performing again. In the spring, her team booked the show at the Greek and a couple of festivals to follow. They plotted U.S. tour dates. Polachek and Copson flew to L.A. in June. Polachek became wildly busy—she seemed made of adrenaline. Rather than writing music, then recording and releasing it, and then going on tour, she was doing all three at once.