It Was an Internet-Adjacent, Pretty Sick Summer…

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The internet is often deemed moribund, but during its heyday, it felt as if a Garden of Eden cropped up at the feet of a generation whose interpersonal networks, self-concepts, and artistic taste couldn’t shake the digital logic informing them — or rather creating them altogether.

Sabrina Fuentes, known for years by many by her Instagram shorthand @sickysab, has lead a life shaped by the intrigues of Web 2.0. Thrown into inexorable internet-captivity from the ripe age of 13, she discovered a sense of fulfilling connection and creative outlet in the chasms of Tumblr and a primordial, square-grid-laden version of Instagram.

Nowadays, Fuentes is much less interested in hatching something out of these mediatic entrails, despite indulging in their bygone idealism as our interview progressed. Instead, the New York born-and-raised artist has been actively facing the other way in her more recent endeavors. This is most evident in her work as the vocalist and bassist of Pretty Sick, the band she founded at the same time as her incursion into the www. Pretty Sick's most recent single, home2hide, dreams up an enclave where morning-afters, nameless cities, and runaways with friends are more than digitally-aired content. Instead, they embody a sense of freedom that is usually relegated to mere aspiration.

To foreground the September launch of Anarchy, Pretty Sick’s album, Luna Sferdianu caught up with Sabrina Fuentes to talk about her nightly dreams prophesying celebrity deaths and, of course, internet nostalgia.

Luna Sferdianu: Sabrina! I assume you're calling from New York. Is it also super warm over there right now?

Sabrina Fuentes: Yeah, I am. It's actually one of the cooler summers we had. I'm grateful for this extended spring, because we had the longest, coldest winter ever. I think if we jumped right into that super hot heat of summer, it would be a bit much. Everyone gets really crazy when that happens.

LS: I live for that brief moment of collective frenzy, though. What have you been up to?

SF: Lately? I've been working on visuals for music, trying to be in nature as much as possible since it's been nice out, and getting ready for the next few songs that are coming up ahead of the album.

LS: How do you source your visuals for music videos? What inspires you?

SF: These days, the things that inspire me are nature, human connection in all forms, isolation. The human experience as a whole in relation to peacefulness.

Things that feel mundane are the most fun to me right now. I’m not trying to be out of this world or next level, I really want to get back to the roots of things. That’s been really fun and inspiring for me to work on.

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LS: What’s the most fascinating thing that happened to you recently?

SF: This past year I've had a lot of dreams that predict celebrity deaths. I knew when David Lynch was gonna die. I knew when Robert Redford was gonna die. I knew when Ozzy Osbourne was gonna die. I knew when Greta Thunberg was gonna be captured by Israel on the Flotilla. That was a random one, but I keep having these dreams the day before something happens - and the person is either there, or they tell me that something happened, and then I woke up the next day, and it did indeed.

LS: Is there any dream that has not yet been fulfilled?

SF: Normally I get them the day before. If it doesn't happen the day of, I kind of write them off. Maybe I should be writing them all down.

LS: So no prophetic dream last night?

SF: No prophetic dream last night. My dream was really peaceful.

I had a dream that there was a fancy Chateau Marmont-style restaurant, a really ritzy venue opening. A bunch of my friends, who were really talented musicians from all over the world, were playing it. It was a really sweet dream.

I hope that it does come true. I hope that all my friends get booked on the same lineup and get to stay in a really fancy hotel. That'd be awesome.

"in a way, we're all internet artists…"

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LS: What is your relationship to the internet?

SF: Growing up, I was so grateful for the internet because I was socially isolated, and I didn't really know how to connect with people on a deeper level around me. I felt generally pretty othered, and being on music forums and early YouTube or Tumblr helped. I was so into Tumblr, and I had so many friends that I met through there that I'm still friends with, and I think that if I didn't have the internet to find other people who felt and thought like me, I would have felt alone for a lot longer. So I'm really grateful for the internet. It informed me so much on fine art and films and music that I wouldn't know about otherwise.

I think I still am able to use it to educate myself on things that I otherwise wouldn't know about. It's just not as easy as it used to be. Right now, the internet is just not what it used to be socially, and I don't really feel like I use the internet super socially anymore, except for to communicate with musicians who live far away from me, whose work I admire. I feel like I don't make friends on the internet anymore. I still meet peers and still have important dialogs, but not so much about my personal life like I did on Tumblr when I was a kid and needed to find friendship and companionship in that way. The internet used to genuinely be the Garden of Eden. I still like it to a degree, though. I don't take it as seriously as other people do, because it doesn't seem to affect me in the way that it affects some other people.

LS: Sickysab is a very striking monicker for the girls who were deeply invested in this digital Garden of Eden, me included. You started off as an Instagram model / overall online figure, and you still are known for that, even though the affordances of that title have been minimized in recent years. How does this communicate with your band’s oeuvre? Would you call your art internet-adjacent?

SF: My life is definitely internet adjacent, and my art is very confessional about my life. In a way, I would, but at the same time, I wouldn't put it in the same category as a Molly Soda-type of internet art. I don't think it interacts with it in the same direct way.

It’s funny that you mention that, because, for the new album, I was drawing inspiration from some of her work and some of my friend Manon's work, because she makes some internet-based art as well.

Even with the internet being dead in the way that it is, there's still so much to expand on there in a way that makes me excited to continue seeing [internet art]. Maybe one day I will look back at my work and see that it was shaped more by the internet than it feels at the moment, but as of right now I wouldn't say so.

LS: After all, it’s embedded in everything, like a tertiary force.

SF: Absolutely, I think all the time how we are the only humans who have ever lived on this earth with a weird, looming, interconnective, international internet. So much information at our fingertips, so much information being bombarded at us, so many images. I think about the sound that is affecting every single person on earth, and obviously it's affecting the art that people make. In a way, we're all internet artists…

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LS: Can you talk me a bit through the microcosm of your new single and upcoming album?

SF: home2hide is technically the second single off the new album. The first one was Star, which we put out in December as a standalone single. The whole album experiments with different genres that have always informed what I do melodically, but when I was making rock music, I just didn't occur to me to combine them in this way. I used to take melodic influences from all of these different genres and kind of put them together, and that's why I think a lot of people think some of my songs sound kind atypical compared to other rocky, grungy stuff. To me, my practice has always been kind of multi-genre. I don't want to make work that's highly influenced from one thing alone, it just becomes too predictable, so I've always drawn from all different kinds of influences in subtle ways, and now I think I just wanted to maximize that side of my personality and experiment with it more. That's what the album's about. It draws on shoegaze stuff, emo stuff, grunge stuff, pop/rap beats, trance music, and electronic music. It tells a story about the life I'm currently living, and builds a better sonic world to paint a picture of what that feels like for me.

It's maximalist, and it's definitely experimental. I am trying new things and trying to feel intuitively what is right through that.

LS: I saw your recent Book of the Month post, with the entry about how people are not reading anymore. You mentioned that literary influences are very important to you, Can you tell me more about the literary world that reverberates in your music?

SF: I went through a big Bukowski phase. I am a huge Anais Nin fan… and André Breton, too. I grew up also really liking Dostoevsky, and I just read White Nights for the first time, and I really like that. Last year read this, a bunch of cool stuff by Clarice Lispector. Off the top of my head, that's the stuff that I was reading around this time. Inspiration strikes so randomly when I'm reading, there are lines that are really clearly inspired by something I was reading, I just immediately write everything down in my notes app. When I go into the studio and start writing, I pull from all of this stuff that I wrote down, so basically anything I read that I find really touching, or even sentences that friends say or things that I pull from the internet.

LS: Do you feel like it interacts primarily with your lyrics, or do you think what you create visually also derives from what you read?

SF: I have made songs that are inspired directly by characters and books. I feel like with art, everything we're responding to is just a reflection of the self, and that character that I read about is able to show me something about myself that wasn't so obvious to me before. Then, when I'm writing a song about it, it allows you to get into that world in the way that you wouldn't otherwise have access to, and then, in a more literal sense, the poetry of certain writers and their lyricism inspires me so much and helps me break out of lyrical ruts sometimes. I write music every day, and, as a writer, people have themes and phrasings that they harp on and can't get rid of. I hate when I'm saying the same thing over and over again. Sometimes it's intentional, but, most of the time I'm trying to avoid it. Reading is so great because it just actually allows my brain to break up the words a bit more by hearing other literary perspectives.

LS: Is that the case for Anarchy?

SF: I think my voice stays the same throughout all of our projects, even though I always expect it to change. It combines a lot of different worlds that have all been really important to me, so it might be unexpected to the viewer or the listener, but it feels really familiar to me, and I think to some people who are really familiar with my music, it might feel as well.

"I like punks. I don't like posers."

LS: If a genie would force you to leave your band, but grant you a lead position in any band ever, which band would it be?

SF: Ever, ever? It would feel so good to play in Black Sabbath. Being on stage every night playing those songs would hit like crack.

LS: How do you feel about the music scene right now?

SF: I think there's a lot of really cool shit coming out. Obviously, because of where we're at culturally right now with the indie sleaze stuff, I think certain aspects of DIY music feels oversaturated because people are so inspired by DIY scenes of the past. I don't think that's a bad thing at all. There's a lot of great work coming out, a lot of stuff I'm really excited about, and I'm meeting more musicians that I've never heard of who I'm impressed with.

LS: Do you have any collab goals?

SF: I was thinking about this the other day. I've always said a dream would be Björk, she's just the GOAT. Who else would be really cool? Iggy Pop or Debbie Harry are some of my role models. I also love JT so much, I listen to JT all the time, so also her.

LS: What is the most evocative feeling to express through music?

SF: Those end of chapter, bittersweet moments that are quite melancholic, but not totally unoptimistic.

LS: Do you have any regrets?

SF: I have plenty, but I'm so happy with where I am in my life and the people around me, the artists I get to collaborate with, the friends I get to work with, that it doesn't really matter.

LS: Can you tell me a secret?

SF: I have a secret, I need to put it in a vague way though… There's so much shit that I really don't like, and I constantly talk shit in my personal life, but it doesn't feel worth it to expel those thoughts onto a wider platform, so I usually keep them to myself. But then I think people are typically surprised by the things that I really dislike and the things that I do like. So I guess my secret is that I'm a huge hater.

LS: One thing you love and one you hate, for the record?

SF: I like punks. I don't like posers.

LS: Dreams, hopes, fears for the future?

SF: A dream is that I get to share this album with the world, and that people get to see it. It feels like, as a musician these days, it's so easy to make things and feel like you're speaking into a void, just from the way you have to share it on the internet in order for anyone to see it in the first place. As an artist, I'm pretty confident with what I make, and I think it's good, and I think people will like it. So I just hope that they actually see it.

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