“I try to experience pleasure without guilt, and I implore others to do the same,” Cole Haden says.
Of the 100-plus shows that Model/Actriz played last year, that sentiment has never held more true, transforming venues into a fever dream where pop, noise, and cabaret blurred into staggering, all-out catharsis. Haden moaned and shrieked onstage, testing the limits of his voice, then reapplied his lipstick between song changes. He frequently donned a cape (which he first wore around his house to see if it was suited for the stage) and locked hands with audience members, establishing an intimacy that reinforced the physicality of their music.
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“I was a different person in adolescence,” Haden says, reflecting on those shaky early years. “I had some friends, but it was like we fell together by circumstance. It took until I was 15 or 16 to really feel like I had accomplished the skill of knowing how to make friends. That’s when my community started building around me.” Like anyone trying to survive their small town, Haden longed for a way through, passing time by lounging at the beach, crafting beats, and cruising around the Tri-State Delmarva area. Long after he moved to Brooklyn, he’s maintained a group chat with five close hometown friends who’ve carried him through the years, even as he’s shed his old skin. “Where you grew up is not your choice, so your community there is a lottery,” he says. “Then once you have the privilege to choose your community, it doesn’t always include everyone from that first place at all.”
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In myriad ways, adolescence defines Pirouette, their second full-length (out today via True Panther/Dirty Hit). Whereas 2023’s Dogsbody emitted dread, claustrophobia, and menace, straddling the line between violence and desire, Pirouette lets the light in. It’s an album as grounded in dripping sweat at the club as it is about childhood, love, and self-acceptance. Haden has never shied away from his devotion to pop, bowing at the altar of renegades like Lady Gaga, Kylie Minogue, and Britney Spears while using their well-drilled choreography to dial his own performance style. On the new project, it’s an inescapable nucleus, the skittering pulse a conduit Haden uses to confront his closeted past and, in turn, embolden others to abandon their own hang-ups.
That pulse is due, in large part, to the clap stack — a cymbal that, true to its name, mimics the sound of a handclap. The band discovered the instrument during SXSW in 2023, when they witnessed the new-wave cool of Montreal’s Choses Sauvages. “The drummer had a clap stack, and I could have sworn it was a sample. It was the best-sounding thing I’d ever heard,” drummer Ruben Radlauer recalls. It turned out that the player, Philippe Gauthier Boudreau, made those cymbals under his own company, which, significantly, altered their sound. Its presence consumes Pirouette, appearing on nearly every song.
The members have their own memories of traipsing home at 2 a.m., glistening with sweat and spilled beer, making their crossing into clubbier pop a natural evolution. Bassist Aaron Shapiro was introduced to club culture by a friend in his early 20s while working random jobs in Montreal. Upon moving back to Boston, he spent many nights at Middlesex Lounge, going nearly every Thursday for a year. “Then I stopped drinking, and now I don’t go to the club,” he laughs. Radlauer didn’t appreciate the club until the band played shows in Spain around 2023 and went out afterward, triggering a wider understanding. “I didn’t dance before that,” he admits. “I was too self-conscious — I would just stand at concerts. I didn’t know how to do it.” Guitarist Jack Wetmore started attending Blue Mondays in LA when he was 17 or 18. Eventually, he’d seek out similar spaces, though they didn’t all hit the same. “When we were really bored at all these club nights, we’d play a game where if you stopped dancing, you were dead,” he explains. “We would run around for five hours, and if you stopped dancing, your friend could come and hit you. We would just marathon dance party the whole time.”
“Practice makes perfect,” Haden repeats on “Audience,” a song that throbs with pulverizing energy. Aside from the occasional screech, he bears the words in a deadpan cool, but getting there wasn’t nearly as smooth. “I was not nailing it quickly,” Haden recalls of the vocal takes. Four years ago, they labored over Dogsbody (“It was the middle of the pandemic, so we had nothing else to do,” Radlauer suggests), but Pirouette was a far looser, more improvisational process. “Cole was coming in with a steaming plate of freshly written lyrics, and so I think a lot of ’em, he had never really put them to the melodies yet,” Radlauer says. “It was the first time in the booth, so he was just in there, being vulnerable.” They’d run through a few takes, and, in between those songs, Haden worked things out in real time, dropping and adding words. “It got to a point where it was level, and then it would become a conversation. Cole would be asking for our opinion, or we would just give it unsolicited.”
But for all of Pirouette’s brightness and dopamine rushes, the exhaustive vocal runs and cymbal upgrades, there’s a moment when the intensity falls away. “Headlights,” a spoken-word interlude near the middle of the album, offers a radical change in pace as Haden recounts an earnestly painful moment of childhood — an unrequited crush on a friend of a friend. “Over time I started hating him, or I started hating myself, but I hated most how I’d pray each night asking God to make him see me in all the ways I couldn’t,” he says plainly. “I felt as much adrenaline writing that song as I did coming out for the first time,” Haden reveals. “Because I had never spoken that out into the ether, ever, but that was my challenge to myself on this album.” The song was written in only 15 minutes — a feverish process that Haden accomplished last minute. The words had been bubbling up inside him for years, but the resolve to put them on tape was brand new.
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When played back to back, “Headlights” feels tethered to another song Haden helped pen — Miley Cyrus’ “Prelude,” the opener on her forthcoming record, Something Beautiful. “When I heard the album for the first time, it just spoke to me in a way that all of my favorite pop music does in that the songs are bulletproof, but her essence is imbued,” he says. “She’s at her most vulnerable on this album, and it invited me to go to a similarly vulnerable place with her in my response.” Like “Headlights,” the track also wades into spoken word, delivered in Cyrus’ gravelly introspection, all while desiring realness. Understandably, it required time to find the right words. “It took me a while to believe that all she was asking me to do was be myself,” he adds.
In that same vein, it can take just as long to see yourself for all you are. There are unobjectionable things we crave from life — love, pleasure, enlightenment — but getting there often means holding up a mirror, to step out from false stories to embrace murky futures. As he’s reconciled with the past — versions of himself that were lonely, pained, uncomfortable — Haden’s rekindled old friendships through touring. “You find a way to be relevant in each other’s lives,” he says. “Reintroduce yourselves, feel like you’re given a chance to start over when that amount of time has elapsed — that you’re not just trying to make the old bits work into your new life.” If Pirouette proves anything, it’s that reinvention, to live in love with yourself, is just sublime.