“I tend to describe the genre as goth-adjacent,” Erin Hoagg muses while considering her Rare DM project over Zoom in mid-May. She’s lounging in her home studio in the Lower East Side, ready to discuss her forthcoming album Attention. “Bloghouse-influenced,” she adds. “Let’s call it electroclash moon, a rising dark wave, and an electronica sun.”
The NYC-based artist released her debut LP Vanta Black in 2019. “I was devastated, heartbroken, and cried every day for six months,” she recalls of that period. “I finished that record in a rush.” The result is a lush, ethereal collection where the personal becomes something celestial. As she navigates scenes of lovesickness — warnings about someone, falling for them anyway, watching it unravel, pleading for them to stay — synths hiss and buzz. Comparisons might lean toward acts like Boy Harsher or John Maus (she notes that Bennington could be among the best songs ever written by Maus), which would probably be more meaningful than pinning her down to a single label.
“My problem with labels is that, first, dark wave has a ceiling, and I want nothing to do with ceilings,” she says. “I’m breaking through the ceiling. No more ceiling.”
“Secondly, I’m too much of a pop personality to be boxed into that narrow category,” she continues. “I love performing too much, and I want to stage some choreographed routines. Still, post-punk is a strong influence for me; my all-time favorite record is Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights, and that probably has shaped me more than anything.”
Attention, dropping this Friday, preserves the intimate, confessional spirit of Vanta Black while dialing up the party, swagger, and attitude. The opener “Compliment” doubles as a bold club anthem; today’s final single “LA Traffic” is a cheeky self-satire about Hoagg’s habit of running late. It also offers a chic, biting take on the City of Angels’ practiced artifice. “Let’s inspect your social résumé. Who are you? What do you do? Where are you from?” Hoagg notes, a phenomenon she says is familiar in New York as well. “There’s the casual small talk, but there’s also the way people size one another up. It’s one of those moments where the bassline clicked in a way I’m not sure I could ever replicate—this huge LFO on my Juno-60, some arpeggiator that felt like Charli XCX’s ‘Vroom Vroom’ in my own language.”
Seven years separate these records. Rather than being ground down by the pandemic, she treated it as a chance to catch up. “I saw many musicians lose tours and plans to COVID, and I thought, I don’t have anything to mourn. You all are crying; I’m catching up, or I’ll be damned.”
“TikTok used to be a bright spot during lockdown,” she notes. “It split between corny dance clips and gear videos. I landed on the gear side, where curious viewers—people who’d never even heard of a synthesizer but loved Stranger Things—would say, ‘Whoa, how do you do that?’”
Yet releasing music independently—as she did with Vanta Black—was not easy. “Back then I had a bit more money, so I hired a publicist. I secured coverage in Paper, Nylon, but it didn’t matter; the record didn’t take off, and I started feeling less proud of it.”
In autumn 2020, the otherworldly single “Send Nudes” and its cinematic video exploded online, prompting her to boost her funding for future clips in hopes of a parallel breakthrough—and she would soon regret that decision. When she secured opening slots for Molchat Doma, the Belarusian post-punk veterans, her spirits lifted and she redirected her focus toward live performances. Yet even that path carried its own difficulties.
“I remained haunted by the sense that my music didn’t matter, and Spotify wasn’t helping, which weighed on me,” she explains. “People in the industry told me singles were the only viable route—no one cares about albums—while others insisted you must deliver a full album if you want tours and anything else. If you don’t do an album, nothing happens.”
“I eventually gave in to making an album. Thank goodness it happened.” What remains uncertain is what follows, but one thing is clear: Attention delivers a striking collection. Her loquacious style in conversation underlines the sharpness of her lyrics, and the tracks fuse a sense of confinement with expansiveness—like a maze of liminal hallways that opens onto a vast, sweaty dancefloor filled with smoke. If there was a ceiling before, she’s breaking right through it.
Attention is self-released on 5/29.
