Popular Music Interview

In a time when sincerity often masquerades as polish, Popular Music—the collaborative project between Zac Pennington (Parenthetical Girls) and Prudence Rees-Lee—offers something far more slippery and affecting. Their songs are sumptuous, strange, and darkly humorous, weaving threads of narrative discomfort into melodies as lush as they are fractured.

I reached out with a handful of questions—some fan-submitted (Steven), others from REAL — to dig into the textures of their work: the uneasy beauty of failure, the voices we adopt to survive, and the genius of a burrito eaten under fluorescent lights. What follows is less a traditional interview than a glimpse into the logic and anti-logic behind their collaboration—a correspondence that reveals as much in its digressions as in its answers.

QUESTIONS FROM A FAN:

Without any attempts at flattery, you’ve created some of the most beautiful music of the 21st century. At the same time, the undercurrents of your lyrics are often dark or tell sordid stories. What are your thoughts on this interplay between beauty and distress?

Zac: Wow. Okay. Big opener. Respectfully: flattered.

To answer your question: I don't really see beauty and distress as contradictory states. There is a lot of beauty in struggle, I think. I don’t feel especially optimistic about humanity in a broad sense, but I do think there’s something moving about how people try, and mostly fail, to live up to their own principles. Life’s full of dark and sordid moments, and more often than not, those are the ones that shape us, make us feel. Maybe more than the moments we’re actually proud of. Those failures feel truer to me than the triumphs. I just want to approach those things with due reverence.

Related to the last question, do you feel that the use of musical dissonance and noise is a complement to the themes of the lyrics?

Zac: I'd never really thought about it, but I suppose it's possible that we're drawn to certain kinds of sounds for the same reason that we tend to gravitate toward darker narrative themes. I’ve always been drawn to sounds that feel like they’re fraying a little, or on the verge of falling apart. Pop music to me is about creating a sense of feeling, evoking a physical response, and there’s a texture to those sounds that creates a kind of friction. They catch against the skin. 

Gender play in the voice of the singer seems to be a common tool in your songwriting—is this something that happens naturally or does it arrive more intentionally?

Zac: A million years ago, I used to play in a group called Parenthetical Girls. Early on in that project, for the first year or so, I played most shows wearing women's clothes — dresses, mostly. It wasn’t drag, exactly; more like something between theatre and security blanket. I never really interrogated it at the time — for whatever reason, it just helped with stage fright. Looking back, I think the dresses and the way I write songs probably came from the same place: I’ve always felt more comfortable communicating from a perspective of someone other than myself. And when that happens, for a number of reasons, the voice that comes out is often a woman’s. But this has always been more of a creative act than a political one.

What is the best Smiths album, the best Morrissey album, and the best OMD album?

Never heard of them. Are they any good?

What are the essential ingredients of a perfect burrito?

Papas, aluminum foil, an asphalt parking lot, fluorescent lighting.

QUESTIONS FROM REAL:

Prudence, coming from your background in solo work and baroque pop, how did your collaboration with Zak begin, and what drew you to working together?

Prudence:  We met as extras working for central casting in Los Angeles. We spent a full (exhausting) day pretending to be traders on the New York Stock Exchange floor. Zac was fairly intimidating, mainly because he seemed to actually know a lot about trading and global finance, so I was surprised afterwards to find out he was also a musician.

What’s your working dynamic like—do you both write together in the same room, or is it more of a layered correspondence between continents?

Zac: At the moment, it's more of a protracted arbitration between opposing bedrooms. 

You’ve both spoken about borrowing and recontextualizing cultural artifacts in your music. Prudence, how do you approach ‘musical citation’ in your own compositions?

Prudence: It's just easier than writing it from scratch. There is no lost chord. 

The project was partially recorded during lockdown, and remotely at that. What was it like shaping something so intimate across such physical distance?

Prudence: Luckily (unluckily?), we happened to be locked down together — which meant that we worked on Popular Music Plays in Darkness and Minor Works pretty obsessively during the pandemic. I'm not sure if being in lockdown is the best conditions for great art, but it got us through. We've worked remotely with additional collaborators, but the bulk of it happens when where in the same place.

If Popular Music were a film, what genre would it be, and who would direct it?

A romantic comedy directed by Lynne Ramsey. That, or a horror film by Bob Fosse.

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By the REAL Editorial Team | May 26, 2025