Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties, which plays Crowbar in Ybor City, Florida on June 10, 2025. Credit: Photo by Shervin Lainez

It’s a pretty good time to be Sarah Tudzin.

The leader of Illuminati Hotties is in the midst of a European tour where she just celebrated her 33rd birthday in Scotland, and is approaching her second wedding anniversary this summer. The in-demand Los Angeles-based producer is also riding high off a Grammy win for her work on Boygenius’ debut full-length, The Record (band and album name stylized in all-lowercase). On Friday—ahead of a June 10 show at Crowbar in Ybor City—her rock band also releases a new EP, Nickel on the Fountain Floor.

The release is made up of stuff that didn’t make last year’s critically-acclaimed album, Power, a record about love and grief where Tudzin mines the ongoing extreme lows and highs of losing her mother to cancer and finding a life partner in musician Maddie Ross.

“Maybe they didn’t serve that story as much,” Tudzin told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay last week as the band prepared for soundcheck at Paris’ 500-cap venue La Maroquinerie. “There’s some that, I think, feel less emotionally close to the surface, especially now with just my perspective changing and life changing.”

Grief, she added, is like having a cloud on a leash.

“Sometimes it’s doing its own thing and it’s like 40 feet away and you’re not really noticing it. And sometimes it’s like, the leash is tight and it’s very close,” she said, adding that there are a lot of people dealing with similar trauma. “It’s not a thing that happens and that you move further and further away from every day.”

Someone Tudzin does grow closer to daily is Ross, with whom she shares two dogs, a German Shepherd mix named Zeus, and Maeby, an age-defying pitbull mix. Marriage wasn’t on Tudzin’s mind as a kid, and isn’t required for fulfillment in her eyes, but the seriousness of having someone to navigate the future with has been a welcome surprise.

“It’s just so beautiful to have a teammate on everything—on business, on family, on daily life, and on top of that, just a support system that’s reliable, and tried and true,” she said.

The most special thing about Maddie, Tudzin noted, is how she is a cheerleader not just for her, but for so many friends in their lives. For the first time ever, Tudzin—fiercely independent, but also capable of writing all-time couples tunes like “Sleeping In”—didn’t have to squeeze into someone else’s picture frame.

“She’s a person who’s perfectly happy letting me do my thing, and doing her thing, and celebrating the overlap,” she added.

But the world outside of that relationship has started to get darker, especially as Republicans voted to pass Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which, in part, would rip healthcare access away from transgender Americans regardless of their age.

Tudzin, a supporter of the nonprofit suicide prevention Trevor Project, has never shied away from sharing her views; and even modified lyrics for the angular kraut-pop jam “Mmmoooaaaaayaya” (stylized in all-caps) to point out how the Democratic National Committee fucked Bernie Sanders ahead of the 2016 convention. Last month on the NPR Tiny Desk, she took the remix even further with lines about fascist babies ruining the country and free healthcare for everybody.

Watching the rest of the country experience what Florida’s been going through for at least two legislative sessions has been scary for Tudzin, who was careful not to get too much on the soapbox. From Europe, where certain people have been targeted for removal, she can see the parallels back home.

“It’s really so obvious to me that we’re trending toward absolute destruction of what it means, I think, to live in a beautiful society,” she said. “Which is a community of people from all over the world who are working to have a better life together.”

Negotiating with power and control, Tudzin pointed out, means reckoning with oppression, but also empowering yourself.

“There are a lot of people in control whose power can be taken, and there’s a lot of people who are in control that don’t need to have power,” she said. So in Tampa, Tudzin knows that activism will creep into the set, like it does every night.

“Existing in this world the way I do inherently has activism woven into it, it has to have steps of education woven into it,” she said, adding that presenting her life in a certain way is inherently an activist act.

While there are far more intentional forms of activism, the job feels punk to her, especially when she can make her voice heard onstage and resonate with the group of people in front of her doing work in their own communities to push back.

“These are people who are inviting their friends to be a part of changing the fucked up shit that’s happening right now,” Tudzin explained. “At home and in the rest of the world.”

Tickets to see Illuminati Hotties play Crowbar in Ybor City, Florida on Tuesday, June 10 are still available and start at $20. Readers are invited to submit their own events to Creative Loafing Tampa Bay’s things to do calendar.

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