Sofi Tukker and bread: an unlikely pair, but strangely kindred spirits at life's all-you-can-eat buffet.
Both rise to the occasion, one on stage and the other in the oven, fermented by time and heat. One feeds our souls, the other our bodies. Sofi Tukker's new album BREADHowever, it does both.
An acronym for “Be Really Energetic and Dance.” BREAD will premiere on Friday, August 23. Ironically, we are breaking bread over brunch on a sweltering summer afternoon in Brooklyn, the kind where the subway grates are spitting dragon breath and even the pigeons look lazy.
Like a fresh baguette, the album It's best devoured immediately, still warm from its creation. But with racy images of ass-less guys, microphone vibrators, and fingers tracing tantalizing paths through hair, what happens to your stomach afterwards, or, ahem, other body parts—it’s not Sophie Hawley-Weld or Tucker Halpern’s business.
For them, though, embracing the bizarre isn't artistic masturbation, but evolution in action. Despite their album's not-so-subtle eroticism, they're proof of the magic that happens when raw talent and vulnerability meet.
“I feel like I'm always on the edge of confidence and doubt,” Hawley-Weld says. “Sometimes I can feel very confident about things and very doubtful at the same time. I just feel both, maybe to a fault, honestly.”
Yet it's hard to sense even a hint of doubt when looking at the dress Hawley-Weld wore for the cover of BREADA masterpiece of surrealist fashion, the dress was developed by CHRISHABANAwhose pieces have been worn by Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Madonna, among other music icons whose legacies are canonized by ornate, dreamy outfits.
But even with a pedigree like that, the East Village-based creative studio was surprised by Sofi Tukker's request to materialize her take on bread, which the duo believes “conveys decadence, sex, and happiness.” That's according to its eponymous founder, Chris Habana, who worked alongside the stylist Anastasia Walker To give life to the look.
“In our six years or so of making costumes, we've received many intriguing requests and I have to say that this one initially threw us off,” Habana says. EDM.com“But after the first talk, it became a really fun project to dive into.”
Habana says the dress needed to travel, so her team couldn't use real bread. They wanted to create each ornament from scratch, but with limited time, they had to buy artificial food displays and eventually landed on a selection of fake croissants, baguettes and other bread varieties.
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As if the dough were rising in real time, a particular challenge arose when Habana had to cut the “bread” to design the intricate bib of the dress.
“Manipulating the bread to create the arched breastplate was a challenge that my team was fortunately able to accomplish by cutting the foam bread and wiring it inside,” Habana explains. “The bread used for the floor-length skirt that arrived was also a single-tone white bread. I thought it would be more interesting to give it a toasty look. I ended up mixing various shades of brown paint and applying them with a roller and light coats over the textured surfaces. In the end, it looked like realistic toast.”
In the end, it took Habana and her team just ten days to design, make and ship the daring dress to Brazil for the photo shoot. Hawley-Weld didn't even know at the time if it would fit, she tells me. Maybe it was her brash soul or her icy blue eyes that pierced the veil of her absurdity, but somehow she managed it.
The dress conveyed her vision while beautifully reflecting the vibrant music of BREADa sensual cycle of radiant house music and carioca funk with Brazilian and Portuguese influences. It also served as a reminder that music, fashion, food and sex lose their flavour when they are subject to too many restrictions.
Yeah “CRAZY” was Sofi Tukker's postcard from the edge of sanity, BREAD is their leap into the void. The new album is what happens when artists accept and submit to the most creatively unhinged versions of themselves.
With the ability to unabashedly explore taboo concepts through a cerebral lens, they’ve become masters at transforming fun, irreverent subject matter into transcendent experiences for fans. Look no further than the zany music video for the album’s first single, “Throw Some Ass,” where Halpern and Hawley-Weld exude confidence and transform into saucy provocateurs before our eyes.
As hips gyrate and bare butts bounce in the video, the profane somehow becomes profound.
“We usually take risks in videos,” says Hawley-Weld. “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 Butts That Won't Move Well' with our butts in the air, we invested a lot of our own resources into these absolutely crazy ideas.”
“And then I always get really, really nervous and think, 'Oh my God, what did we just do?'”
Filmed at the stunning Palácio das Laranjeiras in Rio de Janeiro, the bold video is a reminder of why rules are made to be broken. The same applies to the song's edgy music video BREAD single “Spiral,” which co-stars Heidi Klum.
After all, boldness is the yeast that makes timeless music emerge. Think of David Bowie’s chameleon-like transformations or Björk’s alien soundscapes: weirdness is a weapon if you wield it with intention and purpose. That axiom rings especially true in 2024, a time when algorithm-approved playlists and focus group releases render music irredeemably obsolete.
No one knows that better than Halpern, a former basketball star who says he often felt out of place in the locker room as he struggled to balance his love of the game with his desire for self-expression. He became his high school's all-time leading scorer and was nominated for a McDonald's All-American award before playing at Brown University, where he captained his team.
“I was in the sports world,” she recalls. “I always had a tendency to be a bit flamboyant with my style and different from other sports people, but I was still in that world and I was very shy. I thought about those aspects of myself and I got a lot of criticism for it.”
“Seeing myself as an artist… it was a tough 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 laughed at me. They were like, ‘No, you’re in this box. You’re an athlete, you can’t do that. ’ And it wasn’t until there were enough people who believed in that that they accepted me as an artist or accepted that I wasn’t just an athlete pretending to be an artist. Then I started to feel the freedom to dress how I wanted, to wear my hair how I wanted, to just take risks and not give a shit.”
And it paid off. When Halpern and Hawley-Weld came together on their own convictions as deranged surgeons, they took Sofi Tukker to heights few have ever reached in the dance music scene. They prophesied this captivating delirium through the first lyric of “Benadryla haunting song they released in 2018: “I Lost My Mind With My Socks.”
How far they intend to go from here remains to be seen and heard, but one thing is certain: they are living proof that the most satisfying things in life often arise from daring to deviate from the recipe.
BREAD It will feature 10 tracks, including collaborations with Channel Tres and Kah-Lo. You can pre-save the album here.
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