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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.’”)
The two are long-time fans of each other’s work, and sparked up a friendship over Instagram. When Hughes began thinking about releasing “Galina” as a single (prompted, in part, by the track becoming a fan-favorite), Rodriguez was the first person who came to mind as a possible collaborator. “I definitely wanted a female-identifying voice on it, because it’s about female relationships,” Hughes explains. “And I just sort of thought through who I knew, and Lorely made a lot of sense.”
While they only met in person for the first time on the set of the visual they filmed for “Galina” in Los Angeles a few weeks back, both Rodriguez and Hughes see each other as somewhat kindred spirits. “Allie, the artist, I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s my girl,’” says Rodriguez. (Indeed, Rodriguez also seems to have a side gig as pop’s biggest hype woman—if you follow her on Instagram, you’ll often spot her in the comments gassing her peers up.) Adds Hughes: “I feel the same about you! I feel like we have a lot of mutual friends, we’ve both been doing it for a minute, same kind of audience. I feel like I knew you before this, but we’d actually never had a conversation in real life before we did this collab.”
One thing they bonded over was their love for an acrobatic melody. “I wouldn’t want to be on a monotone song—I wanted to sing!” Rodriguez exclaims, while Hughes notes her affection for “big, soaring, all over the place-kind of choruses” that she traces back to being a theater kid. (At this, the pair go on a tangent about their musical outings in high school: Rodriguez fondly remembers appearing in a production of Guys Dolls, while Hughes performed Bernstein’s Candide.)
But the subject matter of the song—which is, at its essence, the tale of a strange connection between two women—also felt appropriate for a collaboration between two industry peers. “I think in my life, I’ve had these women, especially older women, come into my world with this very maternal, mystical thing going on, and steer my life in a positive direction,” says Hughes. “That’s always been very significant to me. And, yeah, Galina was one of those women. There’s almost like a maternal, divine, feminine love embedded in the song.” Adds Rodriguez, with a wink: “You love Galina because she made your skin bomb. She made your face gorgeous.” (To create a visual accompaniment to the single, the pair worked with the cult film director Jennifer Juniper Stratford, who also made the videos for Hughes’s Girl With No Face era, with the operative word for their fashion being “regality.”)
Finally, though, I have to ask: Was Hughes ever able to recreate that magic cream? “No!” she says, before breaking into a laugh. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told people about the eczema thing—it was in this one interview I mentioned it, I couldn’t resist.” Yet it’s all part and parcel of the knowing, campy humor that runs through Hughes’s music. Just consider the song’s layered meaning, which—depending on how you spin it—could be a tale about friendship, fandom, or even something a little more Sapphic.
For Rodriguez, though, the reason for doing it was simple. “I was just happy to be in your universe for a little bit, Allie,” she says. “Getting dressed up, becoming a different character… it’s almost like acting. At the end of the day, it’s doing stuff like this that makes our jobs fun!”
