Allie X and Empress Of are having two very different Mondays. Connecting over Zoom from rural Canada, Allie, real name Alexandra Hughes—who now lives in Los Angeles, but is back in her native country for a summer vacation—sits on a sun lounger with the bucolic splendor of a forest-edged lake behind her. Lorely Rodriguez, meanwhile—the Los Angeles native behind Empress Of—is in London, where it’s 10 p.m. on a bank holiday weekend, and she’s returned to the apartment she’s renting from a big day out dancing at the legendary Notting Hill Carnival. “Sorry, I’ve had a few Aperol spritzes,” she says with a grin.
While both musicians are pop chameleons, their most recent records are also a study in contrasts. Hughes’s Girl With No Face, released in February, is a dazzling, theatrical slice of ’80s synth-pop perfection, produced in its entirety by Hughes. Released in March, Rodriguez’s For Your Consideration, on the other hand, expanded on the woozy, Latin-inflected dance-pop of her previous releases I’m Your Empress Of and Save Me to become her most self-assured album yet. So it came as something of a surprise that the two had teamed up for a rework of Hughes’s album standout “Galina,” a wonderfully wonky ode to an older female mentor who mysteriously disappears from Hughes’s life. (It turns out the more literal inspiration was an old Russian woman who worked at a skin clinic and created a bespoke lotion that cured Hughes’s eczema: after she retired, Hughes was unable to track her down to acquire the recipe. “Basically, Allie called me and was like, ‘I have this song about eczema, and I feel like you need to be on it,’” jokes Rodriguez. “And I was like, ‘Okay. Period. Let’s go.’”)