On a drizzly, gray October morning, I arrive at a nondescript address in a northeast London suburb where, I’ve been told, Caroline Polachek is shooting the cover for her new album. Given the musician’s knack for world-building—the delicately arranged layer cake of baroque Disney backdrops and ’90s Steven Meisel Versace campaigns that informed the visuals for her 2019 record, Pang, for example—I expect to arrive at a studio filled with extravagant sets and esoteric props.
Instead, I find myself at an outdoor train museum, where Polachek is crouched inside an old subway carriage crawling through a pile of sand. She’s wearing a dress covered in coffee stains (intentionally, it’s worth noting), a lick of kohl across her eyelids, and she’s surrounded by extras playing oblivious commuters. “I wanted the cover to be a kind of explosion of being in the real world,” she explains—or at least her version of the rush hour crush.
The cover Polachek is referring to is for her upcoming album, Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, out this February—the second under her own name, though it’s technically her seventh. Now 37, she first came up as the lead singer of the Brooklyn indie duo Chairlift, but when the group disbanded in 2017, Polachek found that success was far from guaranteed. A turbulent period in her personal life followed—divorce, moving from New York to London, mysterious adrenaline rushes, and bouts of insomnia—during which she wrote Pang. An introspective and often self-deprecating document of personal rebuilding, it served as one of 2019’s most virtuosic pop records, earning Polachek an entirely new and fiercely loyal fan base, helped in no small part by the success of her sleeper hit “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.” But a handful of shows into the tour, the pandemic arrived, throwing everything Polachek had planned into disarray.
What else was there to do, then, but embrace the disruption? “It’s definitely an extroverted album, and I’m playing a lot more with nonsense and abstraction,” says Polachek, framed by the whitewashed walls of her home in Los Angeles when we reconnect over Zoom the morning before she’s about to head to South America on tour. Typically, Polachek would hole up in a studio for weeks on end to write, she tells me, but this album was recorded in fits and starts and sporadic bursts of creativity: across a number of years, across a number of countries, wherever Polachek’s own headline shows or her stint supporting Dua Lipa could accommodate a recording session. Along the way, she has also found the time to burnish her image as a fashion favorite, appearing in campaigns for Loewe and Vivienne Westwood and walking the runway for the likes of Chloé and Eckhaus Latta. “I think in some ways, I made peace with the chaos,” she reflects. “The jumbling up of all of it ended up feeling correct for the music.”
Polachek’s instincts for pop songwriting have sometimes felt almost mathematically precise; on Desire, they’re let off the leash to freakier and far more unexpected places. “I wanted to turn the volume up on this feeling of overflowing and overabundance,” she adds. “Maybe even a bit more mania. I definitely hope there’s humor in there, even if it’s just a sonic switch-up that catches you off guard,” she says, before adding, wryly: “Or makes you scream.”
Polachek’s snap-crackle-pop energy relaxes a little when we chat about the music itself—even as she acknowledges the album is her most willfully eclectic work yet. She talks of ancient Roman cornucopias, of the ants and volcanoes and bottles of wine that have become recurring visual motifs—emblems of life’s unsteadiness over the past few years. Still, amid a relentless touring schedule, she’s also managed to find a more grounded existence, splitting her time between London and Los Angeles with her partner, the British visual artist Matt Copson. (He codirects her videos, while she has soundtracked his laser projections and even contributed an aria to a recent Kurt Cobain-inspired opera he directed in London; in their downtime, they play the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering.)
Polachek herself hasn’t quite figured out the album’s title: Desire, I Want To Turn Into You. “It could mean being in love and wanting to fuse with someone, or the deep, manic hunger that comes with being obsessed with someone,” she says. “But it could also mean wanting to become desire itself. Which is really the force that guides us through our lives.
“The moments of sincerity, the moments of abstraction on the album, it’s all contained in that phrase,” she continues. With her second record, Polachek is ready to nudge her surreal, seductive strain of pop in a new direction. A little more louche, a little lewder, and a little rougher around the edges? “I think I like that,” she says, with a mischievous smile.