Sabrina Fuentes puts synthesizers and programmed beats beside the guitars on Pretty Sick’s second album, Anarchy. Released in September through Dirty Hit, much of it was produced with Oscar Scheller in Los Angeles. The change is explicit in the album’s own description, which gives electronic production a central role.
Fuentes began as a New York bassist and songwriter. Her 2022 debut, Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile, attracted comparisons with earlier guitar bands; Will Green’s Best Fit review also noted places where the voices pulled awkwardly against each other. The new production gives her different options from the ones Green was considering. His reservations concern the earlier record.
“home2hide,” co-produced by Scheller and Frost Children, is where that shift becomes particularly clear. Danielle Chelosky’s Stereogum preview identifies a house rhythm beneath the song’s blurred, cinematic setting. The single arrived in June, six months after “Star.” Fuentes had already been edging towards the club; the album gives that movement a full thirty minutes.
UrNewImTrue runs less than two minutes; Prosperity takes more than four. Together with the house rhythm Chelosky identifies in home2hide, those differing lengths suggest several ways of accommodating the new production. The ten-song, thirty-minute format leaves room for both brief songs and tracks allowed more time to develop.
The house rhythm in home2hide changes how Fuentes can organise a song. It gives a songwriter previously discussed through guitar-band comparisons another way to organise a song. Anarchy does not erase that background. It makes the old shorthand less adequate, which is a welcome complication for a second album.