You wait ages for a brilliant pop song about film-making, and then two come along at once. Hot on the heels of Charli XCX’s “Camera” comes Sofie Royer’s “Actress,” with lyrics that name-drop rotoscoping, call sheets, screenplays, establishing shots, cinéma vérité, and more. “When the dust settles on your heart / I’d like to audition for the leading part,” she purrs over a pumping disco beat, piling up metaphors to woo some film-obsessed crush with screwball wit. “My mise-en-scène is flawless, don’t you know I’m quite adored / I’ll win you over in 35mm 4K-restored.”
It’s a typically sharp and playful track from a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist—and, as it happens, aspiring actor—whose smarts and taste shine through on one of the year’s best albums, the upcoming Before/After. Its lead single, “Cowboy Mouth,” turns a Sam Shepard play into a song; another track spins the word “sesquicentennial” into a catchy funk-pop chorus. Her music is worldly enough to mix Italo disco with new wave and garage rock, and across her records, she pulls in a wide cast of cultural figures, from Andrei Tarkovsky to Kenneth Anger, Luigi Mangione to Ivy Wolk, balancing her knowingness with a sharp sense of humor.
“Maybe I’ve just spent too many years on [academic journal database] JSTOR, but I love a good reference, right?” she says, having studied philosophy, psychology, and English for a teaching degree. “Paying attention to references is one of the coolest things you can do: it’s a little keyhole into another piece of knowledge.”
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, Royer seems to ask me as many questions as I ask her. After an unusually itinerant life, she’s now relatively settled in the city.
Now 35, she was born in the US to an Austrian mother and Iranian father, both IT workers in California. She spent her high-school years in Vienna and attended a conservatoire thanks to her skill on the violin. That left her with a musical mindset that’s “very classically based.” She says she wouldn’t call herself a singer-songwriter. “I struggle with even calling myself a singer!” But, she adds, “if you’re doing violin solos [as a child], you have to want to be on stage. So I don’t have a lot of stage fright—for all that I couldn’t really sing when I released my first record, I was just like, whatever, it’s like karaoke with my own songs.”
At 19, long before she started writing songs, Royer moved back across the world to work at the Los Angeles record label Stones Throw. Did she feel American again? “That’s a really hard question. If you come from a mixed background, and then you’re socialised in a third country, you never really belong to one place. I’m always just ‘part-‘, right?”
She’s also aware of how a mixed identity like hers can be packaged and sold. She cites a recent sarcastic lyric she admires by Charli XCX—”My heritage could give me quite the USP”—and frowns at the idea of female-only DJ nights. “I think you want to be a musician regardless of gender and heritage. I know it’s not fully possible, but I’d 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.”
After LA came another move, to London, where she was one of the first employees at Boiler Room, which has since grown into one of the world’s biggest music startups thanks to its brand-partnered livestreams of DJ sets. Boiler Room eventually took on major investment cash, and many in the underground see it as having sold out. “There just wasn’t a necessity to scale up in that way,” she says.She says, “It’s a bummer because it makes you think: everything [countercultural] is kind of doomed, isn’t it?”
While she was working there, Royer’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. As an only child, Royer quit her job and moved back to Vienna to take care of her and start her degree (plus another one in painting, which she left unfinished). Alongside state-funded therapy, songwriting became a way for her to cope. “I 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 my brain is going a hundred miles an hour, when every sense is kind of occupied, it’s when I’m playing something and singing to it.”
Her debut album, Cult Survivor, came out in 2020, but performing it live “was like reopening an old wound,” so she started expanding her writing. She dressed up as a pierrot character for 2022’s Harlequin, “a different persona to help me get over the fear of being seen as a singer on stage, maybe,” and based 2024’s Young-Girl Forever on a French philosophical text about culture’s obsession with young women. “The beauty of age is that you care less and less about it. You couldn’t pay me to go back to my 20s.” She reconsiders. “I mean, you could pay me, because I’m self-employed, so I’m up for money.”
She is highly respected by her peers, with Lana Del Rey, Air, and LCD Soundsystem all having her support them on tour, but she’s not headlining the same venues. She tackles that relative lack of financial success and fame with humor on the new album. “Always a nominee, never a winner / The longer I keep this up the less I can afford dinner,” she sings on Sold Out the Jazz Club, just one of many references across the album to how Royer is, as that song’s chorus puts it, “too pop for the art world, too indie-darling for the mainstream.”
“Very few professions are as measured in metrics as people working in the arts,” she says, “specifically music, and these metrics are publicly available” – like Spotify listeners and tickets sold. “And not only that, then you’re being interviewed: ‘Where do you see yourself in five years? What does success mean to you?’ That’s what I wanted to perhaps let go of when it came to these songs.”
She has also moved on from therapy, singing “I spent five years on that couch, and I’m not ever going back again” on another new song, C’est la D. “I was actually in therapy for longer than five years, but it just sounded so cool to sing five instead of seven,” she deadpans.
She says she definitely needed therapy at first, but when she reached the limit of her free hours from the Austrian state, her therapist said she could continue, but he didn’t think she needed it anymore. She agreed with him: “We as humans have a certain amount of resilience, but there’s a lot of financial value placed in today’s market of psychoanalysis. In a lot of other cultures, that maybe aren’t as socialist as the one I currently enjoy living in, there’s more value in keeping somebody unhappy and dependent on therapy for the rest of their life.”
Now a full-time musician (“a lot of it is an email job”), she is also branching into acting after a cameo in the 2024 remake of erotic drama Emmanuelle, playing a bar singer (though a scene opposite Naomi Watts, who was “an absolute delight,” didn’t make the final cut). She’s been making two films with Austrian director Jasmin Baumgartner, a former student of Michael Haneke: Too Hot to Die, a satirical…A comedy about a reality dating show, and the bigger-budget dramedy Sentimental Fail Club. “I’m not there for myself; I don’t have any demands or wishes when I’m acting,” she says of its appeal. “You’re just the paintbrush, and the film is the canvas. You’re just one element in someone else’s artistic vision.”
Despite all the layered meanings and references in her varied career, she’s also great at a straightforward love song, like “Opium,” where she compares her feelings for her boyfriend to the drug’s high: “A hundred years is nothing with it, I want more,” she sings. Even here, though, there’s a touch of art-historical insight. “That one just felt like such a direct, honest song,” she says. “And also, like, structurally dadaist. So it made the cut.” Before/After is released via Stones Throw on 4 September.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the topic ranging from beginner to advanced written in a natural conversational tone
General Background
1 Who is Sofie Royer
Sofie Royer is an American singer songwriter and multiinstrumentalist based in Vienna Shes known for her eclectic genreblending style that mixes synthpop new wave and artrock with a distinctly wry intellectual lyrical perspective
2 What does everything countercultural is doomed actually mean
Its a cynical observation that any movement or art form that starts out as an underground rebellion will eventually be absorbed and commercialized by the mainstream losing its original power and meaning Its the idea that the system always eats its own rebels
3 Is this a new song a quote or a concept from her
Its a central theme in her work often referenced in her interviews and reflected in her album concepts She explores the tension between artistic authenticity and the pressure of the music industry examining how cool becomes a product the moment its recognized
4 Is Sofie Royer actually pessimistic about the future of music
Not entirely While shes deeply skeptical of the industrys machinery her music is a testament to creating art on her own terms She uses the doom as a starting point to ask How do we create value outside of the mainstream anyway
5 What kind of music does she make
Imagine a blend of 1980s synthpop French chanson and lofi indie Its often described as art pop or avantpop Think of artists like Stereolab early Kate Bush or a more melancholic version of Saint Etienne
The Big Questions Philosophy
6 Why are countercultural movements always absorbed by the mainstream
Because capitalism is incredibly good at commodifying rebellion Once a subculture becomes visible the market steps in sells the aesthetic back to the masses and dilutes the original message The safety pin becomes a fashion trend not a political statement
7 If everything is doomed to be coopted why bother creating art
For Sofie the value is in the
