Lorely Rodriguez is seated on a couch in the corner of an empty Manhattan photo studio overlooking the glittering Hudson River. A decorative gold crown glued onto one of her teeth occasionally catches the afternoon light when she smiles, which is often. Rodriguez has plenty of reason to be cheerful. After two-and-a-half years of polishing, her second album as Empress Of, Us, is finally ready to meet its audience.
Empress Of’s 2015 full-length debut, Me, was an exercise in active self-acceptance set to high-strung electro-pop. Written, recorded, and produced by Rodriguez between Brooklyn and Mexico, the record showed a young woman navigating independence in the face of heartbreak, insecurity, and objectification. “I have always used my music as a way to stand up for myself, whether it be from a crippling relationship, someone catcalling me on the street, or someone telling me that I’m inadequate because of my gender,” she tells me. “I have always used it as a defense, and as a voice.”
Several months after the release of Me, Rodriguez moved from New York City back to her native Los Angeles, where she surrounded herself with the comforts of her Latin heritage (her parents immigrated from Honduras). From there, Rodriguez chugged along on her next record, scrapping versions of it over and over again as she struggled to find the album’s emotional balance: How much of herself could she give this time around? “On your second album, so many people want you to make the same thing that you made before,” Rodriguez says. “It took a lot of just not listening to that.”
In the interim, she released a few one-off singles and collaborated with Dev Hynes of Blood Orange, along with the dance duo DJDS and Spanish producer Pional, all of whom appear on Us. Rodriguez still self-produced over half of the new album, but retaining a sense of control while working with other artists for the first time gave her a crucial confidence boost. While Me was made in solitude, Us is a product of community.
On Us, Rodriguez’s dance club euphoria bursts with confidence. She built Me around hyper-specific anecdotes from her life—“Nothing comes between us/But a piece of latex/When you tear my clothes off/Like I was a paycheck”—a winning approach that nonetheless made rehashing those feelings onstage night after night exhausting. True to its title, Us focuses on shared experiences. On opener “Everything to Me,” Rodriguez and Hynes celebrate an easygoing friendship; on “I Don’t Even Smoke Weed” she acknowledges a very relatable feeling of social anxiety. “This is more about bigger feelings, because I knew my experiences are ones other people have had,” she explains while picking at the remnants of a Sweetgreen salad. “I wanted to deliver them in a way where people could see a little bit of themselves.”
Connection is a humble ambition that is, on some level, at the root of all music. But Rodriguez works hard to actualize this human desire and make it the crux of her artistry. During our brief time together, she quietly stresses the comfort of those around her with little check ins to make sure everyone is doing OK. Us, it seems, is a sensation worth striving for, even if momentarily.
Lorely Rodriguez: A huge reason was I just wanted to be closer to my mom and my family. Being back in L.A. has been hugely inspiring for me, to be surrounded by a lot of the cultural things that I grew up with. Being Latin American, that means having all the food from my childhood, the music coming out of everyone’s homes and cars. I didn’t realize I moved to L.A. for that, but in hindsight I can see I was definitely missing it.
There’s a couple people in the Latinx community in L.A.—comedians, musicians, performance artists—that I’ve been trying to collaborate with. When I directed the “When I’m With Him” video, I tried to feature people from that community who inspire me. There’s a person on the bleachers [Leather Papi] who I saw do a performance piece at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A. where she was referencing her heritage in Mexico. I was blown away, so I asked her to be in the video. Roseli Martinez, who’s also in the video, is a DJ in a female POC vinyl collective in L.A. called Chulita Vinyl Club.
There’s a lot of things on this record I am extremely proud about because I took so much ownership over it. I really followed my gut and did things that I was scared of: the visuals, the album cover, everything. I realized I need to have a huge hand in how my work is delivered to people. Especially as a Latin woman making art, I don’t want to be misrepresented.
Activism is such a cultural thing right now, but it’s also being exploited for marketing purposes. I may not always be an activist. I’m just existing as a person who experiences adversities from the world. I may just be trying to defend myself, you know? Obviously some things really hurt me, and it hurts to see people like me suffering. So I do speak up about things and try to use whatever value I have to give back. It doesn’t feel like a lot, but yeah.
I wanted to make something that felt like the last three years of my life and wasn’t as emotionally isolating as the last record. This record has so much emotional variation. That’s really healthy for me. I play it, and it’s not too heavy on one side. It’s like an evenly seasoned dish.
I wanted to write about friendship, because it’s really important to me. The first song on the record, “Everything to Me,” is about my friendship with Dev [Hynes] and some of my friendships in New York. New York can be such a heavy city, but when you’re with the right people, you can get through anything. I think that’s a nice message. When I started to write songs like that, I realized that this record should be called Us. “I’ve Got Love” is about a friend who had mental health issues and wanted to commit suicide. They confided in me, and I didn’t know how to react, so I was just telling this person all this stuff. It wasn’t getting through, so I came home and wrote that song as a reaction, and played it for my friend.
That’s why I sang some of it in Spanish, because it was so hard to say some of the stuff that I’ve said to partners in arguments in a song. A lot of my lyrics recall an event, or I’ll sing some of the things that I’ve said. I started to write in Spanish later in the recording process because I felt a little exhausted writing all my feelings in English. Writing in Spanish was a relief and an alter ego.
By taking responsibility of some of the visual stuff, I’ve learned that I love clothes. My mom was a seamstress and she made a lot of my clothes when I was little. I have her sewing machine at home and I’ve been getting into making my tour outfits. Clothes are such a big thing for this record. I’ve been experiencing how to deal with my femininity because I don’t feel traditionally feminine. The word is changing. I feel very feminine, but I want to make my own definition of that, with the album cover or the clothing in a video. I love things that connect me back to my childhood, like Dickies and Cortez’s, really classic East L.A. styles, and bringing in heightened shapes you wouldn’t usually wear with them, like ruffles, chains, and plastic belts.
I really stepped out of my comfort zone, lyrically, writing that song. A younger version of me would try to mask a lot of stuff by being dreamy, but the lyrics on this record are really straightforward. It took a lot of tweaking and confidence to get to that point. “Timberlands” is just about self love. The story is that I’m out with my friends, and an ex comes up to me and thinks they have the right to invade my space. I just like the idea of saying, “40 nights, 40 days, 40 ways to say I don’t feel sorry”—it’s like everything you want to tell somebody, but you’re not going to because they’re not worth the energy. Sometimes people can be uncomfortable by how direct my lyrics are. I love “I Don’t Even Smoke Weed” because it’s not about smoking weed, it’s about being comfortable with someone that you love and doing something that usually you hate. Also, I moved to L.A. and everyone smokes weed here.
