Brace yourselves, Sofi Tukker are back and ready to light up dance floors everywhere they go.
Last time the New York dance-pop duo came to Australia it was… eventful. Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern were performing in Townsville for Groovin The Moo when Sophie had a “freak accident.”
“I was just going crazy, I was running around, and I don’t know what happened,” she told Richard Kingsmill on 2019.
The pair finished up their set (a solid 20-30 minutes later) and then went straight to emergency, where Sophie found her foot was broken.
Despite having to cancel two months of festivals all over the world, it actually “ended up being a blessing,” one that led to Sofi Tukker writing “some of our best music.”
Dancing On The People came out of that solitary period of time, spent focused on writing and producing.
Last year, Sofi Tukker founded an artist collective and label by the name of Animal Talk. As well as signing buzzy US acts LP Giobbi and BOII, they use the collective as a vehicle for throwing “the craziest, high-energy, fun, accepting party” they can.
“We had this group of friends and kept meeting people around the world that we really believed in and wanted to give them a shot,” Tucker said. “We wanted to have a thing where we could go and throw the craziest raves in nightclubs and do it our way with our vibe.”
Step one: decorate the club as a jungle. Step two: give everyone entering the venue a neon mask.Step three: party.
“Tucker was DJing wearing a purple hat and a cheetah print shirt, there was people on top of people, I was crowd surfing a lot…” Sophie explained of the raves.
“The first time that we ever threw an Animal Talk party was in San Francisco, and the morning after we threw the party we felt so inspired, we started writing [Purple Hat] on the tour bus.
“When I injured my foot, we revisited the song and were like oh my god, that’s exactly the song we want to be putting out into the world now!”
And that’s how ‘Purple Hat,’ the most recent single off Dancing On The People, was conceived.
Dancing On The People isn’t just typical club hits though. Each of the six tracks adds a different flavour into the steaming pot of thumpers that the duo have simmering away.
‘Ringless’ is a slow burner, ‘Fantasy’ is about as geometric as a song can get, and ‘Like This’ takes the form of a playful, bouncing house track.
Sofi Tukker aren’t afraid to play with language in this EP either, blending cultures in lead track ‘Swing.’
Starting off with a rising string section, the lead single then bursts into a “rhythmic” bass heavy number, which sees the pair singing in Portuguese (something Sophie learnt in college and is very close to being fluent in).
“We love how Portuguese sounds, it’s almost like a mantra in the same way ‘Drinkee’ is,” Sophie told Kingsmill. “The poem itself is so clever.”
“And in Brazil, oh my gosh it’s so fun to play there, but it’s really cool because people know the words to the songs in Portuguese. It’s just so different because they know the meaning.”
They also teamed up with Columbian duo Bomba Estereo for ‘Playa Grande,’ a trilingual track that darts between English, Portugese and Spanish with ease.
True to their ‘Purple Hat’ lyrics, “purple hat, cheetah print/dancing on the people/rolled up at the after joint dancing/dancing on the people,” Sofi Tukker are setting themselves free with a bunch of shows across Europe and the US.
According to Sophie, “animals have no shame. They’re wild and don’t have self-consciousness and we really want to create an environment where humans can come and just tap into the part of themselves that doesn’t have that self-conscious vibe, where they’re just free to be themselves and not ashamed of themselves in any way. We want to have that collective experience at our shows.”
Hear the full chat between Sofi Tukker and Richard Kingsmill on the 2019 podcast, below.
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