Sofi Tukker bring their Eurodance cheese and coy pansexual joy to Toronto: ‘We’re excitable people and we like to have fun’

It’s a touch clichéd to describe anything as “a breath of fresh air,” but it’s also tough to imagine a contemporary music act more befitting the description “a breath of fresh air” than Sofi Tukker.
Sofi Tukker really is a breath of fresh air — a warm dance-pop breeze generously scented with persimmon, caipirinha and sea foam, with more than a dapple of sweat and musky naughtiness also carried on the wind. The internationally sourced, currently New York-based duo of Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern has become, over the course of 10 years, three albums, a couple of EPs and an endless stream of utterly charming singles, collaborations and remixes, a singularly lovable presence on the 21st-century musical landscape straddling the not-so-disparate worlds of underground dance music and mainstream pop. 
The duo’s good-humoured mix of Eurodance cheese, four-to-the-floor thud, dusty guitar twang, coy pansexual smut and ace tunesmithery bridges the gap between the dance floor and the airwaves with an effortlessness swagger on par with the likes of Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Charli XCX and Sophie Ellis-Bextor — and yet what Sofi Tukker does is entirely their own multilingual, multicultural thing. Moreover, Sofi Tukker just projects … joy. Sofi Tukker is fun. It’s overstated, perhaps, but there’s such a spirit of ebullience and inclusivity coursing through the pair’s doggedly upbeat musical output, garish videos and energetic live performances that one can’t help but conclude that they’re an accurate reflection of the two personalities behind it all. 
“I appreciate that,” says Halpern, en route with Hawley-Weld to sound check for the first of two Sofi Tukker gigs in Montreal earlier this week before Sofi Tukker’s back-to-back gigs at History in Toronto this weekend. “I think it’s important to us that we’re never taking ourselves too seriously.
“When we started and we played our first couple of shows and we were kind of trying to be, like, a mysterious, dark electronic group, we didn’t know that was going to be such a big part of it. But we quickly realized we’re just excitable people and we like to have fun if and if we wanna smile, we’ll smile. And that sort of became one of the things that really connected with people so we just ran with it and it’s really nice because, y’know, we get to be happy. We get to go and share joy onstage all the time. So even if we’re having a tough day it’s always a nice thing for us. It would be really hard to be a touring artist singing sad songs all the time. For me, anyway, that would be really hard. I could never do that. Maybe if Sophie wrote all these songs on her own she’d be doing that more. But sometimes when we’re in the studio and we’re making something ridiculous, we’re just laughing the whole time and I’m glad you can feel that in the outcome.”
Sofi Tukker’s late-summer release Bread — an acronym for (of course) “Be Really Energetic and Dance,” in the same way that the vaguely bawdy title of 2022’s giddy Wet Tennis LP actually stood for “When Everyone Tries To Evolve, Nothing Negative Is Safe” — finds the duo claiming its own unique sonic territory with more confidence than ever. 
Recorded in New York, Florida and “a lot in Brazil,” the new album lets the cosmopolitan influences that have always set Sofi Tukker apart really rise to the surface, casually mingling bossa nova, Miami bass, jungle, hip-hop and effervescent Euro-techno without a hint of affectation. Sofi Tukker’s global influences come across as entirely natural and unforced, largely due to Hawley-Weld’s own somewhat “global” upbringing. 
Born in Frankfurt, she was raised near Victoria, B.C., travelled extensively with her peripatetic teacher parents and studied in Italy before running into former Division 1 basketball player-turned-DJ/producer Halpern while they were both attending Brown University in 2012. So it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that she can, say, simultaneously deliver verses in Portuguese, French, German and English on Sofi Tukker’s smashing current single “Woof” — which also guests Nigerian rapper Kah-Lo — without breaking a sweat. She repurposed the words of Brazilian poet Chacal for the duo’s 2015 breakthrough single “Drinkee,” after all, and invokes Chacal again on Bread’s “Cafune.” She’s worldly by nature.
“That’s really how we started,” says Halpern. “It comes from Sophie, who was born in Germany and her parents were always moving around as international-school educators so she just lived all over the world, including Canada. I was always really attracted to music that was in different languages that I couldn’t actually understand. So when I first heard Sophie doing bossa nova in Portuguese I had the idea of, like, ‘Oh, man, if I could put a beat under that and make it dance music that would be something I would be really excited about.’ And that’s always just kind of been the ethos of ‘us,’ of how we started in our collaboration in general.”
The ability of Sofi Tukker’s catalogue — which frequently invites such international stars as Malian duo Amadou et Mariam and Turkish DJ/producer Mahmut Orhan into the fray — to “travel,” as it were, has earned the band platinum and gold records on five continents since the release of their debut EP, Soft Animals, in 2016. 
Obviously, none of that was calculated so the fact that they’ve found such a faithful audience worldwide has come as a delightful surprise. They never thought of themselves as “pop” in the first place.
“It was definitely not the game plan. When we started, we didn’t really know what we were doing,” laughs Hawley-Weld. “The first song that we made was ‘Drinkee,’ which was just a Brazilian poem with that electric-guitar riff and it was definitely ‘dance music’ but we thought it would it would just be this kind of, like, artsy niche thing and maybe a couple of people would understand it. There was definitely no sense that we were making pop music. And then, y’know, ‘Drinkee’ got a Grammy nomination and it got an Apple commercial and I think it was very validating for us to just trust our instincts and trust our guts. Even if it was weird or we didn’t really know what we were doing we can just trust that, if we like it, other people will like it, too.
“The music always travels in really surprising ways that we wouldn’t even think about. Like, our first song was all in Portuguese and it did really well in Italy and in Turkey, and we never would have guessed that those countries would be the ones to gravitate toward us first. You don’t really know why but it’s really cool to see that.” 
“We’re always pushing the limits of what a Sofi Tukker song can be and what genre we are because it’s always a little confusing,” adds Halpern. “But I think with this album we really just hit it at the right amount of Sophie and the right amount of me and the right amount of taking it back to our roots and how we started (by) spending a lot of time in Brazil. This album really did feel like our sound came together a lot for us. We laboured longer on this album than any other album, for sure.”
For the Bread shows, Sofi Tukker promises a characteristically flashy spectacle replete with bigger-than-ever production and a troupe of dancers they recruited because “one of them was basically doing a flash-mob” at our shows. 
“They have their own universe that’s also really fun and really inclusive and contagiously joyous,” says Hawley-Weld. “And we basically have a playground onstage with monkey bars that we can climb on and that also double as a drum machine. We have lasers and videos we’ve put a lot of love into. It’s a whole Bread universe.” 
“it’s a big show,” avows Halpern. “it’s a show that can fit into an arena and it can fit in a little theatre. And it’s definitely fun.” 
Sofi Tukker plays History on Oct 12.