When Sadie Dupuis began writing what would become the next Sad13 project, one of the topics on her mind was “Philly malarkey.”

“We have a mayor I can’t stand who’s done a lot to really harm people,” the Speedy Ortiz leader tells Billboard from a hot-pink room in her Philadelphia home, as she reflects on incumbent Cherelle Parker’s shortcomings on issues from student protestors to public infrastructure.

After Dupuis finished writing on the last day of May 2024, she planned to take a couple weeks before recording the material that summer. Then, on June 10, an accident upended her life.

“It’s shocking I wasn’t killed,” she says of the biking collision that shattered the elbow of her fretting arm. “I went over the handlebars, I hit my head, I was cut all over my body. A week later, a young doctor was killed on the same street by a car doing the same thing: driving into the bike lane.

“But it was funny,” she adds dryly, “to be writing about the mayor and hating the mayor and then I was nearly killed — and if not that, nearly taken off my line of work — because of a decision made by the mayor to move away from the bike infrastructure that we’ve all been pleading for.”

That mayor-criticizing song became “People’s Loser,” one of the nuggets on Sad13’s new mixtape 1331. A proudly DIY collection of 13 short songs ranging from 57 to 107 seconds, Dupuis’ third project under the moniker — and first since 2020 — lands July 10 on Exploding In Sound, Speedy Ortiz’s original label home. Today, the first three songs arrive: “I Am Now Completely Invisible,” “Art Institute” and “Watermelon Manicure.”

Following the injury, Dupuis’ “life flipped over into a basically full-time job trying to rehab it,” powering through extensive nerve damage as her 1331 material, not to mention gigging with Speedy Ortiz, took a backseat.

“My favorite thing that I learned is that all orthopedic doctors are, like, really into guitar,” she says. When some began to cast doubt on whether she’d be able to play again, Dupuis mentioned that she’d recently appeared on Rolling Stone‘s “250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” list. “I’ve never dropped something like that,” she says, “but I found it very helpful in navigating the orthopedic-industrial complex. I wound up suddenly with the premier orthopedic surgeon at the hospital. I go to the Sixers’ PT person and I go to the Eagles’ PRP [platelet-rich plasma injection] person. They take insurance. [The doctors] pass my name along because they’re like, ‘Guitar player!'”

While 1331 is lyrically a snapshot of Dupuis’ headspace in spring 2024, with nods to the fights for Palestinian justice and trans rights, her injury heavily informed the final product. She couldn’t return to the road with Speedy Ortiz until fall 2024 (a support stint for Silversun Pickups), and wasn’t able to begin tracking her new material until the following February — and when she did, due to the pain involved, the project she’d initially planned to lay down in a few weeks ultimately consumed most of the year.

“The cool thing was it allowed a lot more influences to seep into it,” she says. “This was very much like, ‘I saw Rebecca Black and The Hard Quartet this week, that is what’s influencing the production of this song that I wrote over a year ago.’ That was a cooler, or at least a different, experience for me, getting to have these immediate conversations with musical performances I’d seen live.”

The short songs on 1331 are also a paean to music’s best practitioners of concision, from indie-rock heroes Guided By Voices to experimental Philly rapper Tierra Whack. “Everybody does it, from the lo-fi punks to the major pop stars, and [those] tend to be the songs I’m really interested in,” she says.

The catalyst to devote a project to the form — which “aren’t easier in any regard,” because “every microsecond has to count for something” — was Dupuis’ work writing themes for podcasts, including comic Jamie Loftus’ Sixteenth Minute (of Fame). When fans on Reddit wanted to hear full-length versions of the themes, “in my mind, I was like, ‘Well, these are complete. One-minute songs are valid,'” Dupuis recalls. “[1331] was not only an excuse to dive into the format, but also a way to validate it to other listeners: that one-minute songs are just as full, if not more so, than the four- or five-minute version.”

And while Dupuis cherishes the collaborative spirit of Speedy Ortiz, she opted to return to her solo, DIY roots for 1331, writing, recording and engineering it herself — the first time she’d done so in 15 years. Sad13 is “the place where I can be myself and screw around and see what kinds of weird noises I can coax out of a guitar or a synth,” she says of the creative space that also allowed her to dabble in shorter run times.

Speedy’s 2024 support run for Silversun Pickups inspired Dupuis to rethink how she writes guitar hooks, and an opportunity to watch Liz Phair in the studio prompted a change in how she records vocals. “She sits to record vocals, and she sits in a crazy way that she said opens up some different aspect of her voice,” Dupuis says. “There’s more range on this record than on anything I’ve done — it’s over three octaves. I think the sitting-down-weird trick is genius. Liz is God.”

Technically speaking, 1331 challenged Dupuis, who explains that after years in Speedy Ortiz her “standards have gotten a bit high.” The project forced her to “learn a lot of new software,” and reacquaint herself with the all-encompassing nature of a DIY project. As she continues to accumulate production credits for herself and others, that’s paying dividends: Dupuis is currently producing a full album for the first time, by her “favorite Philly band,” the rising trio Grocer.

From Grocer to periodic gigs with the bands like Ovlov and Grass Is Green that Speedy started out playing basements with, Dupuis remains entrenched in her corner of the DIY world — and fittingly, 1331 is her return to Exploding In Sound, the respected indie label whose first release was Speedy’s first record, and that has since released artists including LVL Up, Palehound and Washer. “It’s a return to roots, but we both have so much more experience,” she says with a laugh.

In those intervening years, the business environment for labels like Exploding In Sound and artists like Dupuis has become even less forgiving than it once was — but she remains committed to her craft, a sentiment documented on 1331‘s “Pretty Little Lifers.”

“‘Lifer’ is the term for someone who will just do this forever,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if they get huge; it doesn’t matter if they get huge and then go back to playing basements. You’re in it for the love of the game, and you’re going to play music for life. It’s all about figuring out a way to make it work under a shifting industry that hasn’t often favored the artist.”

As she puts it, “just lifer stuff.”

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