Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz – one of the most prolific songwriters and critically lauded guitarists of her time – releases 1331 today, her first project in 5+ years under her electropop moniker and alter ego Sad13. 1331, a 13-track mixtape of “1 minute long-ish songs,” is out now via Exploding In Sound Records, the label that released Speedy Ortiz’s Sports EP in 2012.
Rooted in her home base of Philly, Dupuis made 1331 totally DIY, the sole performer and recording engineer on one of her projects for the first time in fifteen years. Most of 1331’s writing came in spring 2024, a patch Dupuis calls a “mini nervous breakdown.” Speedy Ortiz records are often personal-as-political, but 2023’s Rabbit Rabbit dealt with childhood abuse. Promoting it felt brutal, and she realized she needed further processing, distinct from songwriting. “Making music is magic, a hurts-so-bad-it’s-good potion,” she says. “But therapy is different, and I didn’t wanna mine it for more art.” She made it a goal to write daily songs around a minute long, a rewarding game to relieve challenges posed in counseling, and trained her lens and lyrical subject matter on her community in Philadelphia rather than her own biography. The Sad13 tracking process stalled, however, after a bicycle accident shattered Dupuis’ elbow in June 2024, requiring reconstructive surgeries and a year of rehab. After twenty-plus years of playing, Rolling Stone had recently included Dupuis in their Greatest Guitarists of All Time, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was displaying her guitar. Suddenly, doctors warned she might never play again. Grueling training put her back on tour three months later, but nerve damage kept her off the computer, postponing Sad13 recording. “My body didn’t have the juice,” she recalls. “But tracking in little bursts over more time gave me broader influences.”
The resulting and hard-won mixtape is 1331, which melds mindsets and melodies across time: whimsical fun amid noisy fury, sophisticated balance shaping wild catharsis. It’s concise, delightfully weird music, a catchy rush that’s distinctly Sad13.
To celebrate the mixtape’s release, Sad13 shares a video for the album’s focus track “Six Ways.” Dupuis plays villains, monstrifying ego with the fizzy bop “Six Ways,” and the video by Matthew John Lawrence (Uncle Peckerhead, Bloody Axe Wound) is out now.
Sadie Dupuis explains of the song and video: “My self-image is laughably dysmorphic, so on one hand, this song is a LARP at gifting myself appreciation I more easily conjure for others. But the song’s dual meaning pokes fun at the narcissism of obsessing over looks, whether you like what you see or not. I was ecstatic to team up with one of my favorite contemporary monster movie directors, Matthew John Lawrence, who I befriended after I moderated a panel for a Philly screening of his film Uncle Peckerhead. He and his crew make the best horror comedies with heart, and this creepy send-up of pop star-playing-pop star music videos (with makeup by my longtime collaborator and friend Paige Campbell) gave me a totally transformed understanding of "Six Ways." It’s a rare and exciting gift when a video can do that for a songwriter.”
Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz, one of the most prolific songwriters and critically lauded guitarists of her time, recently announced her first Sad13 project in 5+ years. 1331, a 13-track mixtape of “1 minute long-ish songs,” will be out on Friday, July 10th under Sadie’s electropop moniker and alter ego, Sad13. A few weeks ago she shared the album’s first three tracks, and today she shares two more ahead of release on Friday. Activists for housing and trans rights were deploying insects, admired on alt-R&B soundscape “Locust Releaser,” while Dupuis is lamenting leftist factionalism on shimmery “Mean, Vindictive, Arrogant.” Check out the songs, and the self-directed video for “Locust Releaser” now.
“I wrote ‘Locust Releaser’ at the start of the cicada double-brood emergence in 2024, considering biblical plagues and two individual cases of housing advocates releasing bees and cockroaches,” explains Dupuis. “In the years since, I’ve read stories of maggots, crickets, and other critters released to protest genocide, transphobes, and police. Bugs: innocent, but I admire the clarity of conviction needed to incite nuisance.”
1331 will be out this Friday, July 10th via Exploding In Sound Records, the label that released Speedy Ortiz’s Sports EP in 2012.
Some lyrics cut straight through the bullshit and latch onto whatever weird, mystical life force is rattling around inside me. That’s exactly how I feel about “Toxic" from Chicago absurdist punks Cel Ray, the follow-up to “Price of Gas" off their forthcoming album Cel Rayzer.
Over squiggly, frantic guitars and scampering drums, Maddie Daviss delivers a brutally funny self-assessment: “I am a toxic moron / Never made a healthy choice.” The jabs keep coming: “Want to be so tough / No I am just some dumb broad.” It's the kind of line that makes me want to point at the speaker and yell "exactly" before realizing I'm in the corner giving myself a high five. Equal parts self-destruction, self-awareness, and dumb-guy confidence. It's a beautiful thing.
Speedy Ortiz frontperson Sadie Dupuis has been recording solo music as Sad13 for over a decade, though lately that project has been on hold. Now, she’s ready to make her grand return with a new mixtape, 1331, and has shared its opening three songs. Listen to “I Am Now Completely Invisible,” “Art Institute,” and “Watermelon Manicure” below. 1331 is out July 10 via Exploding in Sound.
1331 was primarily written two years ago during a “mini nervous breakdown” Dupuis experienced. After the therapeutic but intense subject matter of Speedy Ortiz’s 2023 album, Rabbit Rabbit, and the self-reckoning of her past that preceded it with Sad13’s 2020 release, Haunted Painting, she wanted to lift some of that pressure by writing songs each day that were one minute in length. As that challenge unfolded, the lyrical focus shifted from her personal struggles to the broader experiences of her community in Philadelphia.
Elaborating on the mixtape’s title, Dupuis explains, “1331 signifies palindromes, mirrors, warped balance. It’s a mash-up of two ages in the lyrics. The first, as in my alias ‘sad thirteen,’ represents teenage moodiness, while thirty-one bookmarks young adulthood, which brought me more radical clarity.”
As usual, Dupuis handles all of the instrumentation herself on the mixtape, from three different types of guitars (electric, baritone, and acoustic) to organ, bass, drum programming, and beyond. Tracking 1331, however, was the hard part. In June 2024, Dupuis was injured in a bicycle accident that shattered her elbow and required both reconstructive surgeries and a year of rehab. “My body didn’t have the juice,” she said. “But tracking in little bursts over more time gave me broader influences.”
On July 24, Chicago punks Cel Ray release their full-length debut Cel Rayzer via Exploding In Sound. And today they’ve released the first single from the album, “Price of Gas,” a blistering 90 seconds of nervy Devo-esque new wave colliding with blistering hardcore (egg-core?). It packs a political allegory of the cost-of-living-obsessed American everyman and compresses it into an explosive burst of punk rock that merges the contemporary infectiousness of a band like Artificial Go with the furious roar of Bad Brains. It’s a ripper, but that’s kind of an understatement. Hear this absolute firecracker of a song below.
Cel Ray vocalist Maddie Daviss said in a statement, “This song is a rock opera from the perspective of an American man who is obsessed with the price of gas. He has bottled all his troubles and resentments at the country into the rising gas prices, and how they are keeping him down. He desperately wants to impress his wife, provide for his family, and be behind the wheel constantly, but the cost of living keeps rising without him. He blames the price of gas and his wife for his unlucky lot in life to the point of madness, never seeing the bigger picture.
“Song started as a bit after the boys had written a really good song and I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to ruin it with the most obtuse lyrics possible. However the Gas price man quickly took on a life of his own and exists everywhere AND becomes more relevant day by day with an increasingly worse country … I never wrote down actual lyrics for this song because the Gas Price man would take over my body to sing of his various troubles… over time it became much more about blaming his wife for some reason? Lol best song ever”
