Beloved dance duo Sofi Tukker stopped by the Billboard News studio to talk about their longstanding professional relationship, their new album and much more.
“The truth is we never stopped going to the studio, so we’re just always making things,” the group’s Sophie Hawley-Weld says of the period between the last Sofi Tukker album, 2022’s Wet Tennis, and their new project, Bread, out this Friday (Aug. 24) through Ultra Music.
The other half of Sofi Tukker, Tucker Halpern, adds that they know a new project is forming “once we feel like the songs are telling a story and once we feel like, ‘OK there’s something cohesive here that feels like they need to belong together,’ then we make the album.”
Halpern calls Bread, a 10-track collection that includes features from Channel Tres, Kah-Lo and MC Bola, “a return to who we are when we started. When we started, I had just finished playing basketball, we were in college, Sophie was a jazz musician playing mostly Brazilian music. I was into house music, playing house parties, she brought everything from her world, and I brought everything from my world, and we kind of mashed them together, and I think [with this album], we did that harder and deeper than we’ve ever done before.”
There are indeed layers of meaning in the project, with the title referencing much more than baguettes and sourdough. The title track and the, Hawley-Weld says, “abundant, fun, ridiculous, over the top, sexy, playful world” they created around it with its sumptuous visuals, was partially inspired by the 2009 book The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession With Virginity Is Hurting Young Women.
“Basically it’s about how this idea of virginity and purity is so harmful to women, and the less we have experienced pleasure, the more value we have. It’s just not OK,” says Hawley-Weld. “So we wrote the song ‘Bread’ about owning your appetite — sexually, for food and it’s also a symbol for abundance and owning that as a woman as well.”
“We also don’t want to be preachy when we’re saying things we want to say,” adds Halpern. “We also want it to feel fun and light, because that’s also what people often go to our music for, but there is a lot of meaning there.”
In keeping with this theme, Heidi Klum stars alongside the duo in the recently released video for album track “Spiral.” The trio linked after first meeting the supermodel at Paris Fashion Week, later enlisting her to be in the video, an invitation Klum agreed to under the condition that Hawley-Weld and Halpern appear in it as well.
“There’s just not that many examples of woman who are totally owning their sexuality,” Hawley-Weld says of working with Klum, “and being around that was really heartwarming and awesome, because I don’t want to feel like my sexuality will decline as I’m getting older, and she proves that doesn’t have to happen.”
Watch Sofi Tukker’s interview above.
