Caroline
Polachek
Takes Pop To
Outer Space
30
One evening during the fall
of 2017, Caroline Polachek
found herself on the cliffs
of Palos Verdes in Los
Angeles, staring at the Pacific Ocean and tripping
on mushrooms. At the time, she was a decade into
a career as the frontwoman of the now-defunct
band Chairlift, whose experimental mix of pop, R&B
and rock thrilled indie tastemakers and industry
heavyweights alike: The band’s 2008 track “Bruises”
appeared in an iPod ad, while Polachek and bandmate
Patrick Wimberly worked on Beyoncé’s self-titled
2013 album. “The industry has set up this assembly
line where anyone who’s doing anything remotely
different is fast-tracked toward chart pop,” she says.
Polachek, 34, had flown out to L.A. for writing
sessions with electronic producer Danny L Harle
during a break from touring in support of Chairlift’s
final album. But that night on the beach, she recalls,
“I had this revelation that I shouldn’t be working on
anyone’s music but my own.” When she emailed
Harle to cancel, he wrote back, “Why don’t we just
write for you instead?”
The next day, they made “Parachute,” a ghostly
synth-pop ballad that inspired some of Polachek’s
rawest lyrics to date. “It was a defining statement
about risk and trust,” she says, “and the kind of
resolution that can only happen when you give
yourself over to something.” Which is exactly what
Polachek did next. The self-described classic Gemini
(“Always cheating on my own projects with other
projects I start”) discarded the music she had written
on tour; packed up her life in New York, where she
had lived for 12 years; and spent the next 18 months
chasing the feeling of that first song as she traveled
between L.A. and London, where Harle is based.
The result is Pang, the forthcoming album on which
Polachek — who writes, performs and produces
almost every sound in her work — releases music
under her own name for the first time. Though she has
fearlessly zigzagged among genres in the past, Pang,
due in October, is her most ambitious mosaic yet:
ethereal strings, clanging beats, twangy slide guitars
and, of course, her elastic voice, which can cut through
dense soundscapes with scythe-like precision and at
other times erupt into an almost ecstatic yodel.
That may seem like an unlikely approach from
someone signed to a major label like Columbia
Records. But as Charli XCX and other artists have
shown, there has never been a more viable time to be
a fringe pop star — the kind who can attract a hyper-
loyal fan base and shape the sounds of the Billboard
Hot 100 without necessarily appearing on it. “I’m a
very different artist than most of their roster,” says
Polachek. Yet when she played Sony Music CEO Rob
Stringer an early version of the album, his main note
was to just keep going. “What I aspire to at this point
is building a new planet, rather than going to the same
one,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve ever cared less about
the idea of pop than I do now.” —BROOKE MAZUREK
Polachek
photographed
by S s a m K i m
o n Au g . 9 a t
The Little Friend
in Los Angeles.
PREVIEW 2019
FALL
60 BILLBOARD | AUGUST 24 , 2 019