Taken from this week’s Future Pop mailer. Click here to subscribe.
Sofi Tukker is not what it seems, in more ways than one. They’re actually a duo, not a female solo artist, and although their first two singles are in Portuguese, they’re both American and met at Brown University. Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern now live in NYC, and their music brings a New York edge to current European trends. Their best-known song Drinkee, which gained exposure via an Apple Watch ad, sits somewhere between Feder and CSS. TheAddal remix of Drinkee has 900k plays on Soundcloud, and the original version has done even better on Spotify, with 4 million plays accumulated since it premiered last summer. So far the track has been a hit in Italy and Turkey, and the band are slowly building industry buzz in the UK and US, with Beats 1 among their champions. They recently played a secret showcase in London, and will be at SXSW later this month. Signed to The Knocks’ label HeavyRoc Music and the same management as Dragonette and Cut Copy, Sofi Tukker are finding their place in the US electro-pop scene, but their challenge will be to win over a mainstream audience. The Portuguese lyrics give them a unique cool factor, but they may have to translate that same appeal into their English-language tracks to access a larger audience.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/207481791″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]