As far as lockdown goes, Grammy-nominated electro dirty-pop duo Sofi Tukker — Sophie Hawley-Weld (guitar & vocals) and Tucker Halpern (production & vocals) — played their cards right and landed with their bedazzled booties in the butter.
“We’re calling from Florida,” they sing in unison and Sofi goes the outro solo, “just outside Miami.”
Tucker can’t wait to talk (read: brag) about their palace of a prison, “It’s 4 of us, and we’re really lucky, we just moved into a new house and it’s totally a party pad and it worked out really well — like literally a week before all this started we moved in. It was pretty good timing.”
Between live-streaming a performance for Global Citizen’s #TogetherAtHome virtual music experience and live-streaming dope DJ sets daily on both Facebook and Instagram, they’re maximizing the party pad’s true potential.
“Today is Day 46,” Sofi responds when I ask how many days they’ve played DJ sets for and I’m impressed. I wonder how much repertoire they have just ready to go and Tukker laughs as he explains, “I think yesterday was the first time I repeated a song that I’ve played in the last 45 days.”
Used to playing sold out shows on some of the world’s biggest festival stages or headlining the craziest clubs, I imagine the audience interaction is something they crave and miss the most.
Sofi confirms, “Totally, we get to read comments after [a live stream show], but that’s pretty much it. And you know it’s really nice to get to do that even, and watch people’s stories and see what they’re doing while they’re tuning in, but we miss the whole vibe of a crowd and like everyone swaying and sweating and dancing together, I mean there’s no way to replace that really.”
I ask if Corona toggling the off switch on the entertainment industry has cleared their schedule and I couldn’t suggest something more incorrect. Sofi starts, “Well honestly we’ve become unbelievably busy which is actually really nice,” before Tukker elaborates, “I mean it started with the live streams and then that really caught on, then we started doing live stream festivals, and then we’ve been finishing our album.”
Tukker explains how they’ve been keeping busy with all the things they don’t usually have time for, “It’s actually been really nice ‘cause the past 4 years we’ve been on the road basically non-stop. So this is the first time we’ve like not been traveling since we started the group.”
Their meet-cute involves being booked for the same event at an art gallery where Sofi was the acoustic act and Tukker the afterparty DJ, but before her set was over, he hopped behind the decks and started adding beats to her bossa nova-inspired Portuguese repertoire.
A couple of months, mixes, and remixes later, they wrote a fresh track together and essentially birthed Sofi Tukker. Sofi recalls, “[“Drinkee”] was the first track we did together from scratch and [it] kind of was the catalyst for Sofi Tukker, like it made us feel like we had a sound and a thing going that was interesting to [both] of us.”
They struck gold (and then platinum) with their debut, “Drinkee”, which was nominated for a Best Dance Recording Grammy (2017). Their debut album, Treehouse was also nominated for a Best Dance/Electronic Album Grammy (2018). And then they were invited to perform at the 2019 Grammy Awards, something they still find hard to believe.
Tukker starts, “The weirdest part about it, like everyone in the room is like the best musician ever, and we were out there playing dance music… I think we were the first ever dance music act to be playing the pre-show so it was sort of like a funny thing because all these people are like way better musicians than us for sure, and we were up there doing our thing.”
Sofi indulges my Red Carpet curiosity, “I don’t think I acted natural, like at all. We were very nervous for that. In all the interviews we did, I was speaking in a very high-pitched voice because I was just so, like, exhilarated and just like in shock,” she recalls.
I ask if they happened to bump into Beyoncė (because all hail Queen Bey) and Tukker can’t contain his laughter as he says, “We literally saw Beyonce! She was pregnant, and she walked by us and it was like seeing God.”
Their latest release, Dancing on the People Remix EP, features remixes of their hits, “Swing” and “Fantasy” as well as their latest (and my favourite) single, “Purple Hat” and they’ve invited dance music royalty like Dillon Francis, Tommi Sunshine and Disco Fries, and Israeli duo Vini Vici to reimagine their music. It’s trippy Tech House, it’s booming Drum ‘n’ Bass, and it’s bouncing Psytrance, a truly body-rattling explosion of Electronic ecstasy and Tukker concludes, “I think the cool thing about remixes is, it’s like doing something we didn’t think of. It’s their vision for our song. And some of them work out, and we’re like ‘Damn I wish we thought of that,’ and some of them are like, ‘Na, ours is way better,’ so you never know.”
