Rare DM – Attention

Erin Hoagg’s Rare DM long awaited album, Attention, is out in full today.

Steeped in glamour, cinema, darkness, and humor, Hoagg turns heads with brooding dance-floor-ready songs and witty, impactful videos to match.

On “LA Traffic,” Rare DM shares: “As a recovering “late-person” LA Traffic began as a little self-drag, for how I had trouble getting to “the party” on time. I drove my friends a little crazy – always be trying to leave, remembering something else I still HAD to do. Additionally, socializing is so often networking in disguise. Especially in bigger cities, people size you up for social and career capital while hiding behind pleasantries. This song really clicked from the start. I used my original scratch vocal in for the “baby!” chorus, and my Juno 60 hit some magic with the LFO from the get-go. Producer Margo XS took the mix to the next level.”

On the video: “I had an absolute ball shooting this video with a small crew in LA directed by my bestie Mallen (Matt Allen), CD & edited by me. There is one moment in the video where I break character – I wonder if you can spot it…Who is she? Chronically late and overdressed for the occasion. Did she call the paparazzi on herself? Is she famous? We don’t know, but her situationship in Echo Park smokes like a chimney and won’t hop in the pool with her. She’s a total flirt, only eats organic, and doesn’t hold her liquor well. El Prado is her favorite date spot.”

Erin Hoagg’s Rare DM is a fully realized audiovisual world: Moody, pulsing, and meticulously constructed. Analog synthesizers throb beneath surreal depictions of the mundane. With a midnight love for the avant-garde, Hoagg dons the glamour of art deco with a fondness for vintage suiting, H.R. Giger, Akira, and fantasy novels. Rare DM seeks solace in the otherworldly, obscured in her enigmatic stage presence. As a trained swing dancer, a glimmer of proclivity for the 1920’s and 30’s shines through — also evident via Hoagg’s signature platinum bob; a “vidal sassoon” take on the flapper era style.

With tours spanning across North America, Europe, and Mexico, Rare DM has showcased her immersive DAW-less performance alongside artists including Molchat Doma, Model/Actriz, Xeno & Oaklander, Mareux, and Drab Majesty. Festival appearances include Substance (Los Angeles), Flesh & Steel (New York), South by Southwest (Austin), Coldwaves (Chicago), Verboden (Vancouver), Grauzone (Den Haag), and Black Factory (Kyiv). Stereogum dubbed Rare DM “show-stopping,” while PAPER Magazine praised the viral single “Send Nudes” as “strangely somber yet scintillating.” The track is paired with Hoagg’s self-directed, bike-riding visual that became an early breakout moment — her deadpan, yet kinetic sensuality contrasting the sparsely-populated early days of the COVID pandemic in New York City.

Born in Baltimore to fine artist parents, and later relocating to Manhattan to study fashion design, Hoagg’s foundation in visual art is inseparable from her sound. Approaching Rare DM as an all encompassing art project, Hoagg fuses music, image, styling, movement, and narrative into a cohesive mythology. Neon-streaked, retrofuturistic, dreamlike, often eerie and emotionally charged — her iconography is as deliberate as the compositions. For every video, a new world is conjured up before the first frame is even shot. As a director and editor, she sculpts with a meticulous eye, commanding light, texture, and pacing with the same precision she brings to the studio.

The mastery of synthesis is central to Rare DM’s identity. As a producer and multi-instrumentalist, Hoagg composes with her home studio as her catalyst: Sculpting rumbling basslines, metallic pulses, cascading arpeggiators, and machine-driven beats from a trove of analog gear. Her hardware synths and drum machines are curated and scavenged from the streets of New York, haggled for in the depths of Craigslist and further reaches of the internet. The result is tactile and enveloping: Machines distort and shimmer like living circuitry. Sketches begin in solitude and are refined in motion — on tour, in transit, on bike rides — lending a sense of propulsion and immediacy.

Hoagg makes her true motion picture debut in The Bride!, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, as the synth player for Fever Ray. The Mary Shelley inspired film, starring Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley, hits theaters March 6th. The appearance marks a natural expansion for Rare DM from underground spaces to the silver screen.

Rare DM’s second full-length, Attention, leans fully into spectacle and seduction. Where Hoagg’s debut, Vanta Black, lingered in heartbreak, Attention is kinetic and self-aware — an exploration of lust, performance, and ego. The title nods to both scrutiny and precision: A meditation on being watched, and on watching closely.

“Compliment” surges with electric tension before detonating into a pummeling peak. “Skater Hits Me Harder” reframes adolescent memory through adult desire. “Honey” and “Landed” drift through luminous atmospheres, their glowing synths and weightless rhythms unfolding with a sense of quiet momentum. “Significant Other” is an instrumental that explores Hoagg’s darker sonic terrain while showcasing her technical command. On “325,” an homage to the titular BMW E30, undulating bass propels a fantasy of escape. “Significant Other” answers gridlock with techno-laced urgency. Recurring automotive imagery explores the friction between acceleration and stagnation. Throughout, engines rev, lights streak, and tunnels blur. Motion manifests as metaphor.

With Rare DM, Hoagg designs her world through light and sound, layering vivid textures that feel almost tangible in their flow. Attention expands her universe while keeping its core intact: analog, neon-lit, and humming with intention. Beneath the glow runs a darker current, where shadowy tones and hypnotic rhythms lure the listener onto the dancefloor, which Hoagg weaves into her magnetic live sets.

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