Here, Empress Of talks to Vogue about the record’s long gestation period, her excitement around performing it live, and why making Dream House proved to be a therapeutic process for both herself and her mom.
Vogue: You’ve been rolling out this record for a little while—the first single dropped back in March. Was there a reason you wanted to take things slow?
Empress Of: Yeah, I have. It’s been quite a long stretch. “Blasting Through the Speakers” [released in October 2025] was the initial idea, and then as the record evolved, and I was building the house and getting on the other side of this crazy journey, it became something else, and so I didn’t put that song on the record. But it’s been good. I’m excited. And it’s still evolving—like, we’re still building the house. So it’s just been a bizarre journey, making a record and building a house at the same time. I’m turning in masters while we’re pouring concrete—literally building two things at the same time.
Tell me a bit more about the evolution. I read it was going to just be an EP at the beginning, and then you felt it deserved a bigger treatment?
Yeah, it was an EP, but in a way, I always felt like it was going to be an album. But we wanted to just… Everything’s just been so in-the-moment. I had the EP pretty much done, and then me and my team were listening to it, and they were like, “This is an album.” When I decided to make it an album, I really got to expand. I got to tell my story more deeply. The EP was, “My house burned down, and I’m sad,” and now, the album is me weaving my mom’s story in there, weaving in what home is, that desire to feel like I belong in a room. My favorite part of the record is the end, when you can hear my mom’s footsteps and then she’s like, “Welcome to the house,” and it goes into the title track of the album. Every time I play it for someone, I can just feel like they got a glimpse of what the last year was like.
Did you write “Dream House” in the immediate aftermath of the fires?
No. I was actually making covers, which is weird for me. Music is my passion, but making music at that time felt weird. I feel like when you have something really, really impactful happen in your life, it can take a while. “Blasting Through the Speakers” was actually the first song. I wrote it with Mike Sabath, who works with Raye, though I actually reached out to him because I love Jade’s “Angel of My Dreams” so much. And it was such a beautiful session and experience. He was very protective and allowed me to really just tell my story in the room. I was like, “I haven’t been able to write because music is this friend that I haven’t talked to in a while, and I’m afraid to come to music as a totally different person.” And Mike was like, “Write a song about that.” The song is like, “I can be myself with you. I can dance around naked.” It’s really me talking to music. And that was in April or May [of 2025], about five months after it happened. But it took a while. This record felt different than just writing a record about love or being heartbroken. Because this was an actual, physical thing that happened that I had to work through.
