Sofi Tukker and bread: an unlikely pair, but surprisingly kindred spirits within the all-you-can-eat buffet of life.
Each rise to the event, one on stage and the opposite within the oven, fermented by time and warmth. One feeds our souls, the opposite our our bodies. Sofi Tukker’s new album BREAD, nonetheless, does each.
An acronym for “Be Really Energetic And Dance,” BREAD will launch on Friday, August twenty third. We’re satirically breaking bread over brunch on a sweltering Brooklyn summer time afternoon, the type the place the subway grates spew dragon’s breath and even the pigeons appear sluggish.
Very like a recent baguette, the album is greatest devoured instantly, nonetheless sizzling from creation. However with spicy imagery of assless chaps, microphone vibrators and fingers tracing tempting paths by means of hair, what occurs to your abdomen afterward—or, ahem, different physique elements—is none of Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern’s concern.
Nonetheless, for them, embracing outlandishness is not inventive masturbation—it is evolution in motion. Regardless of their album’s not-so-subtle erotica, they’re proof of the magic that occurs when uncooked expertise and vulnerability meet.
“I feel I’m always on the edge of confidence and doubt,” Hawley-Weld says. “I can sometimes feel really confident about things and have a lot of doubt about them at the same time. I just feel both of them, maybe to the extreme honestly.”
It is tough, nonetheless, to scent even a scintilla of doubt when wanting on the robe Hawley-Weld wore for the duvet of BREAD. A masterstroke of surrealist style, the gown was developed by CHRISHABANA, whose items have been worn by Rihanna, Girl Gaga and Madonna, amongst different music icons whose legacies are canonized by ornate, dreamlike outfits.
However even with a pedigree like that, the East Village-based artistic studio was caught off-guard by Sofi Tukker’s request to materialize their notion of bread, which the duo believes “conveys decadence, sex and making yourself happy.” That is in line with its eponymous founder, Chris Habana, who labored alongside stylist Anastasia Walker to carry the look to life.
“In our six or so years of doing costuming, we have been thrown a lot of intriguing requests and I have to say this one initially threw us for sure,” Habana tells EDM.com. “But after the first talk, it became such a fun project to dive into.”
Habana says the gown wanted to journey, so his crew could not use actual bread. They needed to create every adornment by scratch, however with restricted time, they needed to buy synthetic meals shows and in the end sourced a collection of faux croissants, baguettes and different bread varieties.
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Like dough leavening in actual time, a selected problem arose when Habana needed to carve up the “bread” to be able to engineer the robe’s intricate breastplate.
“Manipulating the bread to create the arched breastplate was a challenge that my team thankfully figured out how to achieve by slicing the foam bread and wiring it on the inside,” Habana explains. “The sliced bread used in the floor length skirt that came in were all also one-tone white bread. I figured it would be more interesting to give them a toasted look. I ended up mixing various brown tones of paint and rolling and layering them over lightly on the textured surfaces. It looked like realistic toast in the end.”
Ultimately, it inconceivably took solely 10 days for Habana and his crew to design, assemble and ship the daring gown to Brazil for the shoot. Hawley-Weld did not even know on the time if it will match, she tells me. Perhaps it was her unapologetic soul or her icy blue eyes that pierced by means of the veil of its absurdity—however she one way or the other pulled it off.
The robe delivered their imaginative and prescient whereas superbly reflecting the colourful music of BREAD, a sultry song-cycle of radiant home music and funk carioca with Brazilian and Portuguese influences. It additionally served as a reminder that music, style, meals and intercourse every lose their savor when certain by too many restrictions.
If “BATSHIT” was Sofi Tukker’s postcard from the sting of sanity, BREAD is their leap off the cliff. The brand new album is what occurs when artists embrace and undergo essentially the most creatively unhinged variations of themselves.
With the power to overtly discover taboo ideas by means of a cerebral lens, they’ve turn out to be masters at remodeling enjoyable, irreverent subject material into transcendental experiences for followers. Look no additional than the wild music video for the album’s lead single, “Throw Some Ass,” the place Halpern and Hawley-Weld bleed confidence and morph into piquant provocateurs earlier than our eyes.
As hips gyrate and naked butts bounce within the video, the profane one way or the other turns into the profound.
“We’ve typically taken risks in videos,” Hawley-Weld says. “When I decided to have an orgasm on the side of a mountain with just my guitar for a video or when we decided to do a ‘Center For Asses That Don’t Move Good’ with our asses out, we’re putting a lot of our own resources into these absolutely crazy ideas.”
“And then I always get really, really nervous and I feel like, ‘Oh my God, what have we just done?”
Filmed on the beautiful Palácio das Laranjeiras in Rio de Janeiro, the audacious video is a reminder of why guidelines are supposed to be damaged. The identical goes for the racy music video for the BREAD single “Spiral,” wherein Heidi Klum co-stars.
Boldness is, in any case, the yeast that makes timeless music rise. Contemplate David Bowie’s chameleon-like transformations or Björk’s alien soundscapes—weirdness is a weapon when you wield it with intention and objective. That axiom rings very true in 2024, a time when algorithm-approved playlists and focus-grouped releases make music irretrievably stale.
Nobody is aware of this greater than Halpern, a former basketball star who says he usually felt misplaced within the locker room as he struggled to stability his love for the sport along with his want for self-expression. He turned his highschool’s all-time scoring chief and a McDonald’s All-American nominee earlier than taking part in school ball at Brown, the place he captained his crew.
“I was in a jock world,” he recollects. “I always had tendencies of being a little flamboyant with my style and out there and different from the other athletes, but I was still in that world and I had a lot of self-consciousness. I think about those sides of me and I’d get a lot of shit about it.”
“Seeing myself as an artist… it was a hard transition,” Halpern continues. “When I first told people, ‘I want to make music, I want to be a producer, I want to be a DJ, I want to be an artist,’ they kinda laughed at you. They’re like, ‘No, you’re in this box. You’re an athlete, you can’t do that.’ And it wasn’t until there was enough people believing in it that accepted me as an artist or accepted that I wasn’t just an athlete pretending to be an artist. Then I started feeling the freedom to dress how I wanted, to do my hair as I wanted, to just take risks and not give a fuck.”
It paid off. When Halpern and Hawley-Weld every hacked out their very own convictions like deranged surgeons, they set Sofi Tukker as much as scale heights reached by few within the dance music scene. They prophesied this fascinating delirium by means of the primary lyric of “Benadryl,” a haunting monitor they launched again in 2018: “I lost my sanity with my socks.”
Simply how far they intend to go from right here stays to be seen and heard, however one factor is for certain: they’re residing proof that essentially the most satisfying issues in life usually come from daring to deviate from the recipe.
BREAD will characteristic 10 tracks, together with collaborations with Channel Tres and Kah-Lo. You may pre-save the album right here.
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