Say it out loud for good luck: Sadie Dupuis and Speedy Ortiz are back with ‘Rabbit Rabbit’

Sadie Dupuis isn’t particularly superstitious but when the Philadelphia songwriter, guitarist, and poet first started work on the songs for her fourth Speedy Ortiz album back in 2021, she noticed the date. It happened to be the first of the month.

So for good luck — following a custom that might date back as far as Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — she wrote the words “Rabbit Rabbit” on top of the page.

And when Dupuis and her bandmates — guitarist Andy Molholt, bassist Audrey Zee Whitesides, and drummer Joey Doubek started preproduction later that year, they made sure to start work on Dec. 1.

Since then, Dupuis says, “we oversynchronized the numerical Rabbit Rabbit-ness of it all for max luck.”

Recording began at Sonic Ranch Studios in West Texas on April 1, 2022. The album — Speedy Ortiz’s first in five years — was announced on June 1. Its second single, “Ghostwriter,” came out Aug. 1.

And yes, Rabbit Rabbit will be released on Dupuis’ own Wax Nine label on Sept. 1, with a tour kickoff. An album release celebration will follow at Johnny Brenda’s in Fishtown on Sept. 5.

“I wouldn’t say it’s that serious-minded,” says Dupuis, 35, speaking of the first-of-the-month fixation while sitting at a sidewalk table at Herman’s Coffee in South Philly, where the band held outdoor meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A copy of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man is on the table. It’s the 98th book Dupuis has finished this year. Her prodigious reading is one reason she was depicted in a drawing by her friend, Nicole Rifkin, on the cover of the New Yorker’s fiction issue last August.

Along with pictures of her beloved pit bull, Lavender, Dupuis posts photos of the stack of books she devours monthly on Instagram. It’s usually 10 or more.

Her most recent poetry collection, Cry Perfume, was published by Black Ocean in 2022. Poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib called the book, which grabs attention with poems titled “Fake Blood On a Fake Fur Coat” and “Come Over Make Mac and Cheese :),” a “bouquet of delights.” Stephen Malkmus of Pavement blurbed it enthusiastically, saying “Sadie’s poems have all day sustain.”

It’s a mutual admiration society: Dupuis once fronted a Pavement tribute band called Babement.

“A lot of people say ‘Rabbit Rabbit’ the first thing when they wake up every month,” Dupuis says. “I started doing it when I was little.”

The double bunny title — a child’s ploy to seek protection — made more sense once Dupuis realized where the album was going thematically, as she explored her relationship with music and history of childhood abuse.

Much of her recent work has been shot through with grief, impacted by the death of her father, and insurance salesman and former music executive William Kornreich, in 2015, as well as the loss of friends and musicians she admired such as songwriter David Berman, who died in 2019.

That was felt in Cry Perfume and on Haunted Painting, the 2020 album by Sad13, her solo project, on which she played 18 instruments. Both works concerned losing friends to overdose, and Dupuis becoming engaged with harm reduction. Her mother, teacher, and artist, Diane Dupuis, drew the portrait of her on the Haunted Painting cover.

On Rabbit Rabbit, Dupuis’ pro-union songs (like the album’s energetic and catchy first single “Scabs”) reflect her progressive political activism. She’s a founding organizer of United Musicians and Allied Workers, an advocacy group that fights for higher payouts from streaming services like Spotify.

But the perky, guitar-driven songs on the album, which Dupuis coproduced with Sarah Tudzin of the Illuminati Hotties, also reflect on Dupuis’ childhood through the prism of adulthood.

That starts with album opener “Kim Cattrall,” a song not actually about the Sex and the City actress, but about, as she says, “poor coping mechanism I picked up as a kid and carried through my 20s. And feeling grateful that I have now gotten a little bit better at treating myself with respect and making healthy choices.”

Before Rabbit Rabbit — which was mainly recorded at Rancho de Luna in Joshua Tree, Calif. — the ever busy Dupuis worked on some freelance projects, including cowriting songs with Carl Newman of the New Pornographers.

For those songs, Dupuis says she found herself “writing about child abuse I experienced many decades ago, but had never wanted to write about or thought I needed to write about. It turned on this light bulb that maybe I should do this with some intentionality.”

“What I landed on was this feeling that I wasn’t protected as a kid. It seemed like the direction I needed to take was to think about my emotional responses as they exist today and how they’re informed by and connected to my childhood.”

Dupuis grew up in New York and studied poetry and math at MIT before transferring to Barnard College and later getting her MFA from Universirt of Massachusetts Amherst. She founded Speedy Ortiz while living in Massachusetts. An indie comics enthusiast, she released an EP entirely inspired by Philadelphia cartoonist Charles Burns’ Black Hole with her starter band Quilty.

Speedy Ortiz is named after a character in the Love & Rockets comic series creator Jaime Hernandez had killed off.

“I thought it would be funny to have the first album by a band called Speedy Ortiz be called The Death of Speedy Ortiz,” which is the name of the group’s 2011 debut. She conceived of it as “a joke between me and my 12 friends. But then it caught on. Luckily, Jaime likes the band.”

Coming home after Speedy tours, she realized she couldn’t live in New York. “I found it pretty exhausting and unsustainable to be a musician when I was living there in 2011, and it’s certainly a lot worse now,” she says. Dupuis moved to Philadelphia in 2016. In 2018, when opening for Liz Phair at Union Transfer, she called her song “No Below” a “love letter to Gritty,” the Flyers’ orange mascot.

She lives in West Philly with Lavender and her partner, Dylan Baldi, leader of indie band Cloud Nothings. The neighborhood is also where the first Speedy EP was recorded, at the now defunct studio called the Sex Dungeon.

When asked by music site Consequence to cite her favorite Philly music, she named 1970s Black punk band Pure Hell, Stiffed, Santigold’s band from the mid-00s, Allentown hard-core band Pissed Jeans, “the Enon record they made when they lived in Philly” (that would be the indie band’s Grass Geysers … Carbon Clouds, which came out in 2007), and Alex G’s DSU.

“There’s an activist spirit in West Philly that’s existed for decades. When I was coming to visit, a lot of my friends lived in that neighborhood, and that stuff has been thriving for a long time. I always have had a great time here.”