Expecting artists to be reacting and have their finger on the pulse all the time is completely stupid. What I want from the next album depends a lot on what I feel emotionally and physically capable of.

TESS POLLOK: You’re a musician, you’re the frontwoman of Pretty Sick and you just wrapped up a tour opening for beabadoobee. How did that go?

SABRINA FUENTES: It went great. Bea and I are good friends. Being on the road with somebody you’re close with is really fun. I’m from New York and I’ve never lived anywhere else in the U.S. so this was my first time getting to spend a lot of time on the West Coast. The crowds were great, I love the fans. Everyone’s been really supportive.

POLLOK: How do you feel about your sound and her sound together?

FUENTES: It’s a really good fit. We both grew up on the same kind of music. We did half a rock set and half of the new EP, which is more electronic. Some of the songs we adapted for the rock set. It was really cool.

POLLOK: You said you both grew up on the same music; who are some of the mutual influences you’re thinking about when you say that?

FUENTES: Pavement, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Sundays, The Cranberries. Those are the first that come to mind. All the fun rock stuff.

POLLOK: I also wanted to talk to you about your recent venture into fashion, P.S by Pretty Sick. Is it an interesting way to get your creative energy out? Do you see it as relating to the music at all?

FUENTES: I see it more as taking time off from the music than I do as relating to it. It’s just important to me to do it because being a musician is my full-time job and being a musician is also my passion and my play. So it’s like therapy for me, in a certain way, to do other creative stuff so I don’t put too much pressure on that one muscle. It’s just a relief to have a different outlet for creation. It keeps me from putting too much pressure on the music.

POLLOK: It can be clarifying for the mind to have a second practice.

FUENTES: I completely agree, clarifying is a great way to put it. It helps me feel like I have more direction, sonically and lyrically, with my music. I get to turn my brain off for a second and not get overwhelmed. A lot of my friends are musicians, but many of them are also involved in some sort of visual art or fashion. I love having time to give them a helping hand on a shoot or with editing or anything like that, because it fuels what I do as a musician to foster that kind of community. It takes your mind off your own shit, so you can come back clearer.

POLLOK: What kind of clothes do you like to wear? What are you imagining when you’re designing P.S?

FUENTES: I only wear comfortable clothes. I don’t like clothes that fit too tight or make me sweaty. I don’t like being trapped in anything that’s too uncomfortable or form-fitting. In terms of inspiration, I draw from all over the place. I don’t like looking trendy; I’d rather risk being frumpy or under-dressed than look like everybody is dressed the same as me. I draw a lot of inspiration from cartoons I grew up with, the way girls dress in cartoons. Also, rock stars: Shirley Manson, Courtney Love, Janis Joplin. Melissa Auf der Maur, the bassist from Hole who was also in The Smashing Pumpkins, she’s someone I think dresses really well. I like looking through photo books and candid photos to see the way people dress. And I love the way old people dress, just because they always have some random as fuck accessory on. That’s so inspiring to me. So, yeah, I would say I draw inspiration from a lot of places, but it can’t be anything too uncomfortable.

I live in New York and I lived in London and they’re both such walkable cities, so I go everywhere on foot. This past tour is the first tour I’ve ever done in heels, I wore my mom’s Manolos, and I broke them in so they fit me perfectly. They’re really comfortable now and I love wearing them. Obviously, your definition of what’s comfortable changes as you get older, especially when you’re more willing to commit to an item of clothing and break it in. If I’m gonna wear something that’s less comfortable, it’s something I have to be committed to in some way.

POLLOK: You’ve been in Pretty Sick a long time, basically your entire life. What’s that been like?

FUENTES: I grew up in New York and it’s really fast-paced. I started working when I was 13, 14–yeah, I’ve been in Pretty Sick since I was 12. I’ve always been an active person, generally. I slowed down a bit with age, with moving to London. Even though I move at a fast pace, I still need a lot of time for myself. When I was younger, I used to be working constantly, being social constantly, always juggling a lot of jobs. Now, I try to do one thing at a time–I’ll spend a month with my friends and family without putting too much pressure on myself to be productive and vice versa. When I’m being productive, I lock into that mode and I see people less. As an artist, it’s less important to me to focus on being productive and more important to focus on making work that I really believe in. That’s fun for me. Work should be something like play, it should be fun creative stuff that I get to do with my friends. If I’m working on something really meticulous, I’ll try and do a big batch or writing or recording and then I’ll give it two weeks before I look at anything I just did. Things take time, even though I’m creating on a daily basis.

POLLOK: There’s a lot of manic energy animating you when you’re younger. As you get older, you learn how to braid these different types of time more.

FUENTES: That’s a great way to put it. Different speeds of living coexist so you don’t burn yourself out. If I did music all the time and wrote every day–I could never do that, I have to have days where I don’t listen to music at all. A lot of my peers are getting off social media more and more for that reason–they’re handing their social media over to management. It’s just too much. Juggling business stuff with music stuff and art stuff can be way too much–even, like, comments from fans will bring up negative thoughts and stuff like that. I think getting away from social media so you can focus more on your craft is a great idea.

POLLOK: Yeah, I hear a lot of artists complaining about that. It’s unrealistic that there’s the expectation out there that someone who’s constantly making work will also be a content stream.

FUENTES: I agree, it’s so stupid. Expecting artists to be reacting and have their finger on the pulse all the time is completely stupid. So many random people on my Twitter For You page are angry at artists, cancelling them for one thing or another. I try to spend less time on the internet these days. It almost feels like the world is divided into a caste system of how much time you spend on the internet absorbing information and how much you spend outside. Different groups of people can be wildly different. It’s always been a bummer to me that the internet dictates so much about how people think and behave. I used to love social media; I grew up on the internet. I used to love sharing things about my life, but that culture has reached a point where it’s completely out of hand. I’m genuinely concerned by how much monitoring is going on. You’re perceived 24/7 in a completely different way than you are in real life. It’s just bizarre.

POLLOK: Twitter is rotten to the core. It’s like logging on to pure animosity.

FUENTES: It’s been funny seeing that human beings are grasping at straws to control the technology they’ve created. Like, I don’t think there’s really anything we can do. It’s smarter than us. It’s beyond us. I was talking to a friend of mine who works in tech and he was warning me that AI was going to come out in a few years and that scientists didn’t know what was going to happen–I remember laughing at him for being crazy, until it did happen. No one knows how this is going to end and no one has the control over it that they claim to.

I used to like social media because it made me able to make friends anywhere in the world. But a big part of its importance to me was that those friendships had the potential to be actualized in the physical world. Most of my friends that I made online when I was growing up are my friends now in-person. There’s people who live permanently on the internet and that really scares me, that’s not for me. There’s people who want to live behind a screen. I’m kind of the opposite. If it’s not being used as a tool to actualize my real life, then I don’t want it.

POLLOK: [Laughs] We’re totally floating away here, let’s refocus. Your most recent album is Streetwise. What were your inspirations for that project? How do you feel about it now that it’s out?

FUENTES: I grew up listening to a lot of happy hardcore and gabber music, rave music–I don’t see those genres as being that different from rock, honestly, they all feel like they’re in the same vein to me. But I wanted to make an album that was more sonically reminiscent of that, kind of like it was an extension of the music I already loved. It was a super collaborative process working with a producer like Woesum–it was my first time in the studio with a producer where we were actually, like, making beats together, I loved it.

With Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile, I wanted an album with a really clear narrative in it. I was ready to close that chapter and do something different. That was the era where I made a rock album with a grunge producer and I was ready after that to just move on to the next thing. Weirdly, all my female friends really love the new album, but my male friends don’t. I had a lot of fun making it and I wanted to share it with the world. I guess some of my male friends thought it was some sort of pop grab. But I don’t think of it as poppy. It’s still very trance-y and alternative and fuzzy to me. I want to make more electronic music. We made so many songs for that project, we made like 35 different songs. I only picked my favorites for the album.

POLLOK: Would you ever release the other tracks? Do you have any plans for another album?

FUENTES: I’m pretty happy with the finished outcome. Maybe some of them would be cool as standalone singles. It was a fun and fuzzy electronic project that was cool and silly, kind of more tongue-in-cheek than my previous work and a lot less heavy. But since then I’ve been through some pretty massive life changes and I’m ready to depart from that mood, I’m not in the mood to be tongue-in-cheek right now. Right now, I’m making music again, but they’re all different genres and topics. It’s funny being a musician who releases new work often because it’s all very confessional and very about my life. Some of the songs are hard for me to sing because they’re about things I went through that were very hard for me to go through. We’ve got a lot of heavier music and the older I get, the harder it is for me to be screaming at the top of my lungs every night and come back from it.

What I want from the next album depends a lot on what I feel emotionally and physically capable of. Right now, what I think is cool genre-wise is entirely unique. In the same way that I don’t like looking like anyone else when I’m going out, I don’t want anything I put out to sound like someone else. All of those things factor into what the next album will be. I’m taking my time whittling the concept down, but it’s become more and more clear to me over the past six months. There are a lot of tracks that I collaborated on with friends that are really cool, from the Streetwise era, and I’d love for them to see the light of day.

POLLOK: When do you think the next album will be out?

FUENTES: I don’t know yet. I keep wanting to take more and more time with it. Which is totally absurd, because I already have, like, 40 songs. The clearer I am when I write it, the more I learn. I want to take my time with everything so I’m not giving myself a specific date to be done with it. It all depends on when it decides to reveal itself.

SABRINA FUENTES is a New York City and London-based musician. She is the lead vocalist of Pretty Sick.

TESS POLLOK is a writer and the editor of Animal Blood.