Catching up with the in-demand studio guru, who’s worked with everyone from Björk to Big Thief, about her empathetic approach to an unnecessarily mysterious field.

April 7, 2022

Heba Kadry’s Dumbo, Brooklyn studio is one of the last stops a song takes before the world hears it. It’s a relaxing space: On a late February afternoon, the sunlight spills across the light wood floors and white walls, the ceiling kitted with acoustic paneling designed to recall Arabic geometric patterns. The big windows that face Kadry’s bespoke desk were a must-have for the mastering engineer and mixer. “I needed to see the day passing,” she says. “I was so done with working in basements, you come out and you feel like a vampire.”

In this room, Kadry is a therapist and a translator, a problem solver and a highly skilled technician. She’s put her refining touch on dozens of records over the last five years, from Oscar-nominated scores to Yaeji mixtapes, Beach House B-sides to Diamanda Galás remasters. In addition to mastering—that is, putting a final polish on songs and perfecting a record’s overall sonic cohesion—she advises on track sequencing to give albums a memorable flow, a process she likens to a curator deciding the layout of an art show.

She brings a compassionate approach to a field that sometimes has a reputation for gatekeeping and sour personalities. “You should never take the artist for granted or make them feel like they don’t know anything,” she says. “When someone comes into my mastering room, I really want to demystify the process, this ‘shrouded in mystery’ bullshit. That is another trope of mastery that needs to be completely eviscerated.”

Kadry, 41, grew up in Cairo, Egypt, in a home filled with classical Arabic music, and she happily took to a Casio 610 keyboard gifted by her father. As a teenager, she turned her attention toward MTV alternative and indie rock. She cites Radiohead’s Kid A as a record that showed her that a studio could be an instrument, opening her up to krautrock and new ways of thinking about the ingredients of songs. Later, while working at a Cairo advertising agency post-college, Kadry’s boss tapped her to help write a jingle. When she saw the engineer behind the board in the studio, Kadry’s next professional pursuit called to her. She took up studies at the Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, Ohio, and then made her way to Houston, Texas, where she landed an internship at SugarHill Studios, the longest continuously operating recording studio in America. Within a few years, Kadry was working as a midnight-to-dawn engineer there.

Her fate twisted again when the head of Chicago label Thrill Jockey, Bettina Richards, recruited her to master Future Islands’ 2010 album In Evening Air. Kadry was working in New York by that point, and she dug into mastering projects with bands like !!! and Liturgy. Then, in 2017, Björk called upon her to mix Utopia. It was a game-changing moment, forcing Kadry to expand her toolkit. “[Björk] approached me about mixing, and I very bluntly said, ‘I’m not a mixing engineer,’” Kadry recalls. “I was an established mastering engineer at that point, but I think she saw something in me that I didn’t even really believe in myself. She technically paid me to figure out how to mix that record.”

Since then, Kadry has only accelerated. She mastered six of Pitchfork’s top 50 albums of 2021, including Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee, Mdou Moctar’s Afrique Victime, and L'Rain’s Fatigue. This year appears to be no different, with Kadry finalizing some of the biggest indie releases of 2022 so far—Cate Le Bon’s Pompeii, Animal Collective’s Time Skiffs, Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, Jenny Hval’s Classic Objects, and SASAMI’s Squeeze. Sitting at the console where she applied her expertise to these records, Kadry spoke to Pitchfork about her work behind the board.

Pitchfork: You’ve said that people skills are what make a good engineer. How have you found that to be true?

Heba Kadry: Anyone can learn the gear. It’s not rocket science. There is a very long development arc to becoming a good engineer, because you have to develop a lot of listening skills, and you have to have taste. But ultimately, what is music? It’s about relationships, it’s about how we connect with each other culturally. Through that, you have to be able to interface with people.

You need to be an incredibly empathetic person. You need to know how to put yourself in the artist’s shoes, and then think ahead, like, I know what they might ask for. You’re not a mind reader, but there are tools that you develop over the course of time. People will throw terminology at you that makes absolutely no sense. Like, “I want this record to sound like I’m walking on grass,” and you’re like, “All right, I need to somehow decode this.” You’re a vehicle for artists to showcase their art in the best way possible. In order to do that, you have to be a team player.

How do you figure out what artists want if they can’t articulate it?

I always ask for references. Like, what do you like listening to? What sounds good to you? What were you listening to that really inspired you during this record? It gives you a bit of a sonic handrail. Maybe it’s a really bass-y record, and they want that. Even if you don’t get it from the first try, you start somewhere, and then you create that dialogue. It’s this process of elimination, where you finally come to a common language and understanding of what they want.

Mdou Moctar’s record was one you worked on last year, and it ended up being a breakthrough for him. How did you approach that project?

One of the notes that I got was, “We want to make sure we master this to sound good on cell phones, because that’s how everyone in Niger listens to songs.” I love the intention behind the record because to me, being a person from Africa and seeing how Africa has always been a victim of imperial and proxy wars, Moctar trying to bring a little joy through the virtuosity of his guitar playing is just mind-blowing. It’s got a grittiness to it that I really love. The mixes were so completely developed that it really didn’t take much for me to make them sound great.

Sometimes you get these mixes that are not quite nailed, and then you have to take it to the finish line. A lot of times, you get mixes that are so on the mark, you don’t want to mess with it. There’s the light-handed touch and the heavy-handed touch—even when you use a heavy-handed touch, you want it to feel like you didn’t really do that much. That takes a lot of dialogue, of course. You can’t have heavy-handed mastering without getting full blessing from the artists and the producer. You don’t want to be that engineer that shoehorns your ideas onto people.

Japanese Breakfast also had a huge year behind Jubilee. What were you going for with that one?

That record was in the middle of the pandemic. I’d worked on their previous record, Soft Sounds From Another Planet. Jubilee was a very straightforward record, because we’d already established that relationship, and I knew exactly what they wanted. It’s effervescent. A lot of what she talks about is joy, so the master had to retain the emotional quality of the songs. The mixes were so beautiful. Michelle is one of the busiest working artists of the last year, it’s amazing to see her incredible rise.

When you’re listening to something to decide whether you want to work on it, what are you listening for?

The song always wins. Even if it was recorded like shit in their rehearsal space, it’s cliche but you want it to make the hair on your arm stand up.

With Jenny Hval’s “Jupiter,” for example, when I listened to that song, something about the verses took me out of my body and back to a very specific time in my life. During the first Gulf War, we were expats living in Kuwait. The war happened in August, and myself, my brother, and my mom were in Egypt vacationing, but my dad got stuck in Kuwait. It was months before we could get in touch with him again, and he had to escape. He grabbed whatever he could, hopped in our Volvo, and drove all the way from Kuwait, through Jordan, to Alexandria, where we were. I was 8 when he finally got out, and we were all waiting for him. It was happiness, warmth, and feeling suddenly exposed to how evil and awful the world is—being so close to death, war, and the horrors of it at such a young age, and then feeling enveloped in this comfort and safeness. That, to me, is “Jupiter.”

What’s also funny about “Jupiter” is, I’d gotten my first vaccine shot, and I was mixing that record—I was, like, high off my ass, feeling crazy. The end of the song—which has that really long, synthy, enveloping drone thing—I mixed it, and I saturated the hell out of it. I pulled out all my tube gear and made it sound as massive as possible, as if Jupiter was getting closer and closer, almost about to burn your face off. The next day, I was like, What the hell, this is gonna sound crazy. But I listened to it and thought, Oh my god, this has gotta stay as it is.

How do you approach remastering older records as opposed to new projects?

You have to get every single version of the release that was ever put out—vinyl, CD, different reissues—and listen to them, because you really need to get your ears accustomed to what the fans have heard.

With Diamanda Galás, it was a year-long process, because she hadn’t heard those records since they were out. The records in the ’80s had a lot of limitations in the way they were recorded because of the technology at the time. We really want to think about: How can we make this better? It’s amazing to talk to her about what she used to record, what her mental state was, and what kind of limitations she had—and getting her response when she’s like, “Oh my god, this is how I heard it back then, but we weren’t able to achieve that.”

I’ve worked on some Ryuichi Sakamoto reissues, and those are, like, the pinnacle for me, because he’s one of my favorite artists ever. He’s also very much involved, and he always wants to retain the integrity of the original recordings, because a lot of them have been recorded so beautifully at the time. It’s just a matter of fleshing it out a tiny bit and bringing it into the modern world, but not taking away the sonic character at all.

How do mixing and mastering use your skills differently?

With mixing, you’re digging deep, you’re not just sonically tilting things—you are actually creating the character of the song. It’s like a playground to do whatever you want with the guidance of the artist and the producer. I find mixing emotionally very different than mastering. I think I’m built more for mastering, because I’ve done it for so long, I can do it in my sleep. Mixing is so much more involved and takes so much more time. I get so much more invested in it. Mastering is all about perfection—correcting mistakes and fixing things. I mix with that mindset. Things that bother me, I have to get in and really fix. I don’t leave that to the mastering stage. That’s why it spends me emotionally, because I have to throw all my mastering knowledge and all of my mixing knowledge into it.

Working across so many styles of music, what do you feel like are the unifying qualities of your work?

It’s the people that I love working with, people that absolutely inspire me and make amazing music. That’s it. People, first and foremost.