When Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern—yes, they’re two separate individuals, and yes, they’re used to people being as surprised by that as they are by their combined 148 inches of height, or the fact that they’re not romantically involved, although they spend just about every waking minute together and even live together—visit the Cosmopolitan offices in the late days of summer, we end up spending more time than I expected (which is to say, any time at all) talking about Tucker’s butt. It’s a phenomenon Sophie is all too used to. Actually, their entire creative team is. See, in the wildly creative video for their recent hit single “Throw Some Ass,” Tucker plays a doctor sporting a lab coat and…a pair of assless pants.
“People kept being like, so how did you convince Tucker to do that? But there was absolutely no convincing,” Sophie says. “Every call we would have with the team, he’d be like, ‘and then I’m gonna be assless.’ And everyone was sort of like okay, Tucker, we get it...”
He interjects: “I wanted to make sure they actually understood the idea! And then we got to Brazil the day before the video shoot. There was so much sunken into this video already and we realized no one had seen my butt yet. So there was this moment of, ‘Uh, can we see your butt? And what if it’s gross?’ So then I get nervous…”
Back to Sophie: “Then he turns around and everyone’s like, ‘Thank God.’” (And because now I know you’re curious, here’s the video.)
It’s fun to witness the kind of back-and-forth, finishing each others’ sentences, endless banter-y entertainment that can only come from a musical duo who have been two inseparable halves of a creative mind since they first connected as undergrads at Brown University in 2012. Tucker was a 6’7” basketball superstar, sidelined by a debilitating autoimmune disease and experimenting with music as a creative outlet and escape when the two started collaborate. The rest, as they say, is history; fast-forward to their song “Drinkee” getting picked up for an Apple commercial, performances all over the world, collaborations with other major artists…
Here I must mention, too, the admirable openness and vulnerability with which this gentle giant describes his brush with a particularly bad case of strep throat earlier this year, which forced him to take a short break from performances and travel. “It was the right thing to do, but it was definitely a little dramatic, because the last time I was sidelined that intensely was in college when I ended up being sick for eight months and I had to completely change my career and reinvent myself as a human being. I was definitely stressing.”
But now that he’s fully back in action, the pair shows no signs of slowing down, as I witnessed firsthand on a recent Thursday night at Devoción coffee shop in Brooklyn. At a performance for Amazon Music City Sessions, broadcast live via Twitch to more than a million people streaming in from all over the world, Sophie and Tucker performed behind and atop a table covered in bread of all kinds. People held up baguettes, using them as props to dance to well-established hits like “Purple Hat” and new tracks like “Hey Homie.”
I’ve tried and failed to describe their dance-y, addictive, you-just-have-to-listen-to-it-to-get-it sound—which is perhaps unsurprising given that they, too, struggle to pinpoint exactly what to call it. “There are definitely heavy Brazilian influences. Yes, it’s primarily dance music, but it doesn’t quite fit in the EDM world. It’s kind of in its own lane,” says Sophie. “We’ll make something in the studio and ask ourselves, ‘Is this SOFI TUKKER enough?’ But then we’re like, ‘What is that, other than something we both love?’ We want to feel free to evolve, always.”
As we get deeper into our discussion of their lastest album, I almost start to wonder whether one possible categorization might be club music for English super-nerds (guilty as charged, hi, it’s me). That’s because all of their lyrics have a deeper meaning and language-melding poeticism to them; at one point in our chat, for example, they reference a poet they’ve worked with extensively.
And then there’s this: The inspiration for their titular track "Bread," which Tucker says became “sort of a thesis statement” for the album, came from the book The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women, by Jessica Valenti. Sophie explains: “It’s about how this idea of purity for women, the idea that you have more value the more virginal you are, is just so hurtful to us and so problematic, and is actually a myth. And so this song is about owning having an appetite, whether it’s sexual or for food, and not feeling guilty about it.”
The messaging works on many levels—she points to the bread-or-booty double meaning of the word “buns” in English and the fact that in Portuguese, the word pau is dick and the word pão is bread. “And then we realized that bread is also something you get pure energy from, and that all over the world there’s a culture of coming together around bread, breaking bread together, coming to common understandings with loved ones.” Last but certainly not least: “It’s also an acronym for ‘Be really energetic and dance.’”
Which is exactly what you can—and dare I say should—do on any stop of their upcoming U.S. tour, which kicks off in Austin, Texas September 18.
