Sofie Royer's new single "Actress" is a witty disco track about film-making, with lyrics referencing rotoscoping, call sheets, screenplays, establishing shots, and cinéma verité. The song follows Charli xcx's "Camera" as a rare pop ode to cinema. Royer purrs over pumping disco: "When the dust settles on your heart / I'd like to audition for the leading part," stacking metaphors to woo a film-obsessed lover. "My mise-en-scène is flawless, don't you know I'm quite adored / I'll win you over in 35mm 4K-restored."
An album of references and wit
The song appears on Royer's forthcoming album Before/After, out 4 September via Stones Throw. The lead single "Cowboy Mouth" recreates a Sam Shepard play in song; another track turns the word "sesquicentennial" into a catchy funk-pop chorus. Her music spans Italo disco, new wave, and garage rock, with cultural figures from Andrei Tarkovsky to Kenneth Anger, Luigi Mangione to Ivy Wolk appearing across her discography.
"Maybe I've just spent too many years on 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 that you can do: a little keyhole into another piece of knowledge."
An itinerant life and a settled home
Now 35, Royer 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 as a violin prodigy. "If you're doing violin solos [as a child] you have to want to be on stage," she says. "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, she moved to Los Angeles to work at Stones Throw records. "If you come from a mixed background, and then you're socialised in a third country, you aren't ever really belonging to one place," she says. "I'm always just 'part-', right?" She also criticises the commodification of mixed identity, citing a Charli xcx lyric she admires: "My heritage could give me quite the USP." She frowns at female-only DJ nights. "I think you want to be a musician regardless of gender and heritage," she says. "I would love for some of the arts to just remain, at least in some small essence, a rare apolitical kind of structure."
From Boiler Room to therapy and songwriting
After LA, Royer moved to London as one of the first employees at Boiler Room, the music startup known for brand-partnered DJ livestreams. It later took major investment cash. "There just wasn't a necessity to scale up in that way," she says. "It's a bummer because it makes you think: everything [countercultural] is kind of doomed, isn't it?"
While working there, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Royer, an only child, quit and returned to Vienna to care for her and start a degree (plus another in painting, left incomplete). Alongside state-funded therapy, songwriting became a way to process. "I was singing a lot of karaoke around that time in the basement of my art university," she says. "It was a real way for me to escape."
Her debut album, Cult Survivor, came out in 2020, but performing it live "was like reopening an old wound". She broadened her writing, dressing as a pierrot for 2022's Harlequin and basing 2024's Young-Girl Forever on a French philosophical tract about culture's obsession with young women. "The beauty of age is that you care less and less about it," she says. "You couldn't pay me to go back to my 20s." Then she reconsiders: "I mean, you could pay me, because I'm self-employed, so I'm down for money."
Metrics, therapy, and acting
Royer is admired by peers like Lana Del Rey, Air, and LCD Soundsystem, who have had her support on tour, but she is not headlining the same venues. On the new album, she addresses that relative lack of fame: "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", whose chorus declares her "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" – Spotify listeners, 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 release when it came to these songs."
She has also released herself from therapy, singing "I spent five years on that couch, and I'm not ever going back again" on "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 needed therapy to begin with, but when she reached the cap on free hours from the Austrian state, her therapist said she could continue but did not think she needed it. She agreed. "We as humans have a certain semblance of resilience, but there's a lot of financial value placed in today's market of psychoanalysis," she says. "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, Royer is also branching into acting after a cameo in the 2024 remake of Emmanuelle, playing a bar singer (a scene opposite Naomi Watts, who was "an absolute delight", didn't make the final cut). She has been making two films with Austrian director Jasmin Baumgartner: Too Hot to Die, a satirical comedy about a reality dating show, and the dramedy Sentimental Fail Club. "You're just the paintbrush and the film is the canvas," she says. "You're just an element in somebody else's artistic vision."
For all the layered references in her career, she can also write a straightforward love song, like "Opium", comparing her affection for her boyfriend to the drug's high. "That one just felt like such a direct, honest song," she says. "And also, like, structurally dadaist. So it made the cut."
