Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis has created a paean to weird women on “1331”, her latest solo mixtape under the Sad13 moniker. Glitchy and medieval, the record is a whirlwind of JRPG chamber orchestration, cavernous organs, and programmed drums. Over thirteen brief songs (the LP clocks in at a slim, self-contained 15 minutes), Dupuis creates a haunted, futuristic universe of millennial malaise.
Three years after the most recent Speedy Ortiz record, “Rabbit Rabbit”, Dupuis returns to her side project, Sad13, for 16 delightfully cluttered minutes. “1331” sometimes comes across like indie rock’s answer to “Whack World:” Besides ultra-short songs, the two records share a capacity for quick-witted wordplay and emotional worldbuilding that elevates them beyond exercises in economy.
On “Art Institute,” a fleet-footed, distorted game of word association, she purrs, “I want immunity to this world’s beauty so that I can rest beyond the bars of sunlight.”
On “Watermelon Manicure,” jagged, dissonant instrumentations recall an ancient, dangerous machine revving up for the first time in a long time; synths swirl around melty vocals. “People’s Loser” is all guitar and drum, a Liz Phair song on shrooms: Dupuis smirks, “The assholes elected do not do what we want. They just do loser shit” over crashing electronics.
“1331” is the product of an overactive imagination and an anxiety diagnosis, the forbidden child of an indie rock album and a videogame soundtrack. Winking, expert, and whimsical, it leaves the listener wanting more.
Sadie Dupuis is still a hot mess—“like, infinite degrees,” to be exact. On “Six Ways,” her humblebrags surf programmed drumrolls that tick like a faulty gas stove and riffs that punch like the ones on Sleigh Bells’ debut. It’s been over a decade since the Speedy Ortiz record where Dupuis dubbed herself “caller of the shots” and “the best at being second place”; now, the cool-loser laureate fancies herself an “armchair head cheerleader.” It’s a juxtaposition that sums up Dupuis’ niche as a hardworking oddball putting her slacker vocal fry and poetry MFA to use in tongue-twisting, slice-of-life pop rock songs.
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