Caroline Polachek on Composing in Three Languages
By Marcelo Ruiz
Caroline Polachek has been inventing languages since she was a teenager. On her forthcoming record, she has finally put one on tape.
We spoke to Polachek in late August at a studio in Los Angeles, where she was finishing final mixes for a new album due in early 2027. She was dressed in a sheer black blouse and running on three hours of sleep. The album, which is still untitled, is her fourth under her own name and features songs in English, in Italian, and in a constructed language she has been developing for roughly five years.
Reflektor Mag: The new record has songs in a language you invented. How did we get here?
Caroline Polachek: Slowly. I've been building this language in a notebook since 2021, maybe earlier. It started as a joke — I was writing nonsense syllables under lyrics as placeholders, and I noticed I kept coming back to the same sounds. Certain phonemes just felt like they belonged together.
At some point I started writing them down and giving them meanings. By 2023 I had a vocabulary of maybe three hundred words. By last year I had grammar. This year I had enough to write a whole song, and the song ended up being too good to leave off the record.
RM: Does the language have a name?
Polachek: I call it Vernoch. It means something like "small bells" in itself, which I did on purpose. It's a hymnal language, basically. Everything about its sound is meant to be sung.
RM: Why Italian?
Polachek: I lived in Rome for a year when I was twenty-three. I didn't speak Italian well then, but I spoke it enough to know it was the most sung-adjacent language I'd ever encountered. English is a dense language. German is a cathedral. Italian is a melody line. When you write in it, the song is half-finished before you add music.
I have one song on the record that started in English and I translated it into Italian to see what would happen. The Italian version was better. It stayed.
RM: Was there any resistance from the label?
Polachek: Not really. They've been patient with weirder decisions than this. Also, I think the broader culture is more open to multilingual music than it was five years ago. The biggest pop song of 2025 was partly in Portuguese. The second biggest was in Korean. Monolingual pop is the exception now.
RM: Does the record have a theme?
Polachek: I don't know yet. I'm the worst person to describe it. I think it's about voicing — in a literal, phonetic sense. What a voice can do. What it is for. Why we make the sounds we make, in any language. The invented language is the thesis statement for that, I think.
RM: When does it come out?
Polachek: February. There are singles in the fall. I can't tell you more than that.
RM: What are you listening to right now?
Polachek: A lot of Hildegard von Bingen, which is maybe telling. Also the new Nala Sinephro. And a Georgian polyphony compilation that my sister sent me. All of it is women singing in languages I don't speak.