Allie X and Empress Of on Fandom, Friendship, and Joining Forces for Their New Single “Galina”

The two are long-time fans of each other’s work, and sparked up a friendship over Instagram. When Hughes began thinking about releasing “Galina” as a single (prompted, in part, by the track becoming a fan-favorite), Rodriguez was the first person who came to mind as a possible collaborator. “I definitely wanted a female-identifying voice on it, because it’s about female relationships,” Hughes explains. “And I just sort of thought through who I knew, and Lorely made a lot of sense.”

While they only met in person for the first time on the set of the visual they filmed for “Galina” in Los Angeles a few weeks back, both Rodriguez and Hughes see each other as somewhat kindred spirits. “Allie, the artist, I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s my girl,’” says Rodriguez. (Indeed, Rodriguez also seems to have a side gig as pop’s biggest hype woman—if you follow her on Instagram, you’ll often spot her in the comments gassing her peers up.) Adds Hughes: “I feel the same about you! I feel like we have a lot of mutual friends, we’ve both been doing it for a minute, same kind of audience. I feel like I knew you before this, but we’d actually never had a conversation in real life before we did this collab.”

One thing they bonded over was their love for an acrobatic melody. “I wouldn’t want to be on a monotone song—I wanted to sing!” Rodriguez exclaims, while Hughes notes her affection for “big, soaring, all over the place-kind of choruses” that she traces back to being a theater kid. (At this, the pair go on a tangent about their musical outings in high school: Rodriguez fondly remembers appearing in a production of Guys & Dolls, while Hughes performed Bernstein’s Candide.)

But the subject matter of the song—which is, at its essence, the tale of a strange connection between two women—also felt appropriate for a collaboration between two industry peers. “I think in my life, I’ve had these women, especially older women, come into my world with this very maternal, mystical thing going on, and steer my life in a positive direction,” says Hughes. “That’s always been very significant to me. And, yeah, Galina was one of those women. There’s almost like a maternal, divine, feminine love embedded in the song.” Adds Rodriguez, with a wink: “You love Galina because she made your skin bomb. She made your face gorgeous.” (To create a visual accompaniment to the single, the pair worked with the cult film director Jennifer Juniper Stratford, who also made the videos for Hughes’s Girl With No Face era, with the operative word for their fashion being “regality.”)