Following a decade-long musical ascension, Caroline Polachek is having a zeitgeist moment - in the midst of a pandemic. Pang, the singer-producer's experimental-pop album debut unfer her own name, was released a few months before lockdown.

Polachek’s climb began by writing and singing in the synth-heavy, indie-rock duo Chairlift, and was fueled by collaborations with giants like Beyonce and mold-breaking musicians/producers such as Blood Orange, Charlie XCX and the PC Music crew. Yet she also took mannered left-turns towards electronic ambient music and minimalist rhythms, when she recorded as Ramona Lisa and CEP. In this way Polachek’s art and pop sides were forever in conversation. On Pang, they blissfully united, and Polachek was set to explore them together on a long tour that included slots at the Coachella and Glastonbury festivals: “Things I aspired to my entire life,” she says.

The pandemic put a stop to all that. Yet the forced home-listening period gained Polachek and Pang an even greater audience. “Way more people connected with the record in 2020 than I could have guessed,” she says in wonder. When touring seemed back on in the summer of 2021, Polachek’s dates quickly sold out, with the singer chomping at the bit, even releasing a new song to mark the occasion.

“Bunny Is a Rider” was finished with production partner Danny L. Harle just before lockdown, but the “summer jam about being unavailable” with the shredding bassline, hit a nerve in the ensuing in-between times. By year’s end, Pitchfork’s writers had called this slice of “psychedelic sexy nonsense” (her words) Song of the Year.  

But this “sexy nonsense” isn’t necessarily where Polachek’s eclectic listening tastes reside. “I have a real love for things that feel mysterious and unplaceable in terms of time and style,” she says, noting the last time a piece of music truly astonished her: “I was listening to a composer I really admire named Valentin Silvestrov. I really like his piano and vocal works, but I wanted to just get into the outer regions of his catalog, so yesterday I was checking out a choral record of his called Sacred Works from 2007. The opening track is “Liturgical Chants: 1 Litany,” and it's just an incredible piece of music. It's clearly playing off the form of early music, but with all these really modern chord changes like it could have been written in the eighties, it could have been written now, or in the future.

Polachek grew up in nineties suburban Connecticut, completely in love with music. “My listening habits first took off when I got a cassette recorder, around age nine or 10. I could use it to record my favourite songs from the radio, and at the time that felt like a kind of reality hacking. It was so exciting to wait until my favourite songs would get played and record it — to have that kind of urgent relationship with capturing audio.” By the time Napster came along, she was all in, “excited that I could listen to pieces of music I knew I’d never be able to find anywhere else.” But also buying used CDs online, “five to 10 a week, a dollar apiece, just devouring music. To me that was paradise.”

This musical consumption peaked when she DJ’ed at the University of Colorado’s radio station. Then, ironically, it was starting Chairlift that tampered her youthful listening habits. “Once I started making music, I felt like my ability to listen to lots of it actually dropped off,” Polachek laughs. “It felt like it moved over to listening to things I was making myself.”  

Nowadays, her schedule works against her. “I’m usually kind of late for my own life in all things, so I wish I was the kind of person that set aside time to just have a cup of coffee, sit down, and listen to a record from front to back.” But listening remains crucial to her creative flow. “One thing I love to do when I show up to a recording studio, especially one that's not my own, is listen to music on the speakers for a while, just to get myself adjusted to [the space]. That often ends up being really pivotal for where the day goes, and what ideas get me excited.”

And in 2022, scratching the recording itch that the zeitgeist has put in play must now compete with finally playing before her fully grown audience (including dates opening with one of the pandemic’s other break-out stars, Dua Lipa). All this means a new way of imagining and listening, as touring forces a fragmented way of working. “I've been able to work on new music in little snatches,” she confesses, “a couple weeks at a time. But I've never made a record this way, in little chapters while playing live.”

A constant, however, is her love of sound and respect for its effects. “Right now I'm really obsessed with the idea of sounds that are spatially located, that have physicality to them – things that have a kind of warm resonance, but are small and specific and tangible.”

She conjures a poetic description of music as “vibrating air that we can have this really rich relationship with. Without us paying attention to it at all, it can completely transform a social scenario or how we feel or the ideas we have. But then, if you choose to dedicate your attention to it, you can go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. I think it makes it so essentially different than any of the other art forms.”