{"id":757930,"date":"2026-09-02T16:50:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T16:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/757930\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T16:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T16:50:08","slug":"everything-countercultural-is-doomed-isnt-it-sofie-royer-the-bracingly-brilliant-pop-star-pondering-lifes-big-questions-pop-and-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/757930\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Everything countercultural is doomed, isn\u2019t it?\u2019\u200b Sofie Royer, the bracingly brilliant pop star pondering life\u2019s big questions | Pop and rock"},"content":{"rendered":"

You wait ages for a brilliant pop song about film-making and then two come along at once. Following on from Charli xcx\u2019s Camera<\/a> comes Actress by Sofie Royer, with lyrics referencing rotoscoping, call sheets, screenplays, establishing shots, cin\u00e9ma verit\u00e9 and more. \u201cWhen the dust settles on your heart \/ I\u2019d like to audition for the leading part,\u201d she purrs over pumping disco, screwball-funny as she stacks up the metaphors to woo some Letterboxd-brained beau. \u201cMy mise-en-sce\u0300ne is flawless, don\u2019t you know I\u2019m quite adored \/ I\u2019ll win you over in 35mm 4K-restored.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a typically smart and witty number from a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and, as it happens, aspiring actor, whose erudition and taste light up one of the best albums of the year, the forthcoming Before\/After. Its lead single Cowboy Mouth<\/a> is a recreation of a Sam Shepard play in song; another song<\/a> makes a catchy funk-pop chorus from the word \u201csesquicentennial\u201d. Her music is cosmopolitan enough to sit Italo disco next to new wave and garage rock, and across her discography there\u2019s a big cast of cultural figures from Andrei Tarkovsky to Kenneth Anger, Luigi Mangione to Ivy Wolk, knowingness offset by her keen sense of humour.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe I\u2019ve just spent too many years on [academic journal database] Jstor, but I love a good reference, right?\u201d she says, having studied philosophy, psychology and English for a teaching degree. \u201cPaying attention to references is one of the coolest things that you can do: a little keyhole into another piece of knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Royer seems to ask me as many questions as I ask her during a bracingly intellectual video call from her apartment in Vienna, where she smokes elegant slim cigarettes in front of a tasteful array of paintings and furniture. After an unusually itinerant life, she is relatively settled in the city.<\/p>\n

Now 35, she was born in the US to an Austrian mother and Iranian father, who were IT workers in California, then spent her high-school years in Vienna and attended a conservatoire thanks to her brilliance on violin. It left her with a musical mindset that is \u201cvery classically based\u201d. She says she wouldn\u2019t call herself a singer-songwriter. \u201cI struggle with even calling myself a singer!\u201d But, she says, \u201cif you\u2019re doing violin solos [as a child] you have to want to be on stage. So I don\u2019t have a lot of stage fright \u2013 for all that I couldn\u2019t really sing when I released my first record, I was just like, whatever, it\u2019s like karaoke with my own songs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aged 19, still long before she started writing songs, Royer went back across the world to work in Los Angeles at record label Stones Throw. Did she feel American again? \u201cThat\u2019s a really hard question. If you come from a mixed background, and then you\u2019re socialised in a third country, you aren\u2019t ever really belonging to one place. I\u2019m always just \u2018part-\u2019, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

Out of place \u2026 Sofie Royer. Photograph: Oskar Burger<\/p>\n

She\u2019s also aware of how a mixed identity such as hers can be parcelled up and sold. She cites a recent sarcastic lyric she admires by Charli xcx<\/a> \u2013 \u201cMy heritage could give me quite the USP\u201d \u2013 and frowns at the concept of female-only DJ nights. \u201cI think you want to be a musician regardless of gender and heritage. I know it\u2019s not fully possible, but I would love for some of the arts to just remain, at least in some small essence, a rare apolitical kind of structure. I love the surreal; I love things that extend beyond the imaginable.\u201d<\/p>\n

After LA came another move, to London, as one of the first employees at Boiler Room, which has since become one of the world\u2019s biggest music startups thanks to its brand-partnered livestreams of DJ sets. Boiler Room ultimately took on major investment cash, and is seen as having sold out<\/a> by many in the underground. \u201cThere just wasn\u2019t a necessity to scale up in that way,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a bummer because it makes you think: everything [countercultural] is kind of doomed, isn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n

While working there, Royer\u2019s mother was diagnosed with cancer. An only child, Royer quit and moved back to Vienna to care for her and start her degree (plus another one, in painting, left incomplete). Alongside state-funded therapy, songwriting became a way to process. \u201cI was singing a lot of karaoke around that time in the basement of my art university, and then one thing led to another. It was a real way for me to escape. When I\u2019m monkey-cymbal-clapping brain, when every sense is kind of occupied, it\u2019s when I\u2019m playing something and singing to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Very few professions are as measured in metrics as people working in the arts\u2019 \u2026 Sofie Royer in a still from the video for Actress. Photograph: Eliott Fettweis<\/p>\n

Her debut album, Cult Survivor, was released in 2020, but performing it live \u201cwas like reopening an old wound\u201d, so she started broadening her writing. She dressed up as a pierrot character for 2022\u2019s Harlequin, \u201ca different persona to help me get over the fear of being perceived as a singer on stage, maybe\u201d, and based 2024\u2019s Young-Girl Forever on a French philosophical tract about culture\u2019s obsession with young women. \u201cThe beauty of age is that you care less and less about it. You couldn\u2019t pay me to go back to my 20s.\u201d She reconsiders. \u201cI mean, you could pay me, because I\u2019m self-employed, so I\u2019m down for money.\u201d<\/p>\n

She is much admired by her peers, with Lana Del Rey, Air and LCD Soundsystem all getting her to support them on tour, but she\u2019s not headlining the same venues. She addresses that relative lack of financial success and fame uproariously on the new album. \u201cAlways a nominee, never a winner \/ The longer I keep this up the less I can afford dinner,\u201d she sings on Sold Out the Jazz Club, just one of many references across the album to how Royer is, as that song\u2019s chorus has it, \u201ctoo pop for the art world, too indie-darling for the mainstream\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cVery few professions are as measured in metrics as people working in the arts,\u201d she says, \u201cspecifically music, and these metrics are publicly available\u201d \u2013 Spotify listeners, tickets sold. \u201cAnd not only that, then you\u2019re being interviewed: \u2018Where do you see yourself in five years? What does success mean to you?\u2019 That\u2019s what I wanted to perhaps release when it came to these songs.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

She has also released herself from therapy, singing \u201cI spent five years on that couch, and I\u2019m not ever going back again\u201d on another new song, C\u2019est la D. \u201cI was actually in therapy for longer than five years, but it just sounded so cool to sing five instead of seven,\u201d she deadpans.<\/p>\n

She says she certainly needed therapy to begin with, but when she reached the cap to her free hours from the Austrian state, her therapist said she could continue, but he didn\u2019t think she needed it any more. She agreed with him: \u201cWe as humans have a certain semblance of resilience, but there\u2019s a lot of financial value placed in today\u2019s market of psychoanalysis. In a lot of other cultures, that maybe aren\u2019t as socialist as the one I currently enjoy living in, there\u2019s more value in keeping somebody unhappy and dependent on therapy for the rest of their life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally a full-time musician (\u201ca lot of it is an email job\u201d), she is also branching into acting after a cameo in the 2024 remake of erotic drama Emmanuelle<\/a>, playing a bar singer (though a scene opposite Naomi Watts, who was \u201can absolute delight\u201d, didn\u2019t make the final cut). She\u2019s been making two films with Austrian director Jasmin Baumgartner, a former student of Michael Haneke: Too Hot to Die, a satirical comedy about a reality dating show, and the bigger-budget dramedy Sentimental Fail Club. \u201cI\u2019m not there for myself; I don\u2019t have any demands or wishes when I\u2019m acting,\u201d she says of its appeal. \u201cYou\u2019re just the paintbrush and the film is the canvas. You\u2019re just an element in somebody else\u2019s artistic vision.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all the many-layered meanings and references in her multi-faceted career, she\u2019s also a dab hand at a straightforward love song, such as Opium<\/a>, in which she compares her affection for her boyfriend to the drug\u2019s high: \u201cA hundred years is nothing with it, I want more,\u201d she sings. Even here, though, there\u2019s a dash of art-historical analysis. \u201cThat one just felt like such a direct, honest song,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd also, like, structurally dadaist. So it made the cut.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before\/After is released via Stones Throw on 4 September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You wait ages for a brilliant pop song about film-making and then two come along at once. Following…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":757931,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-757930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=757930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/757931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=757930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=757930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=757930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}