You wait ages for a brilliant pop song about film-making and then two come along at once. Following on from Charli xcx’s Camera comes Actress by Sofie Royer, with lyrics referencing rotoscoping, call sheets, screenplays, establishing shots, cinéma verité and more. Its lead single Cowboy Mouth is a recreation of a Sam Shepard play in song; another song makes a catchy funk-pop chorus from the word “sesquicentennial”.
Her music is cosmopolitan enough to sit Italo disco next to new wave and garage rock, and across her discography there’s a big cast of cultural figures from Andrei Tarkovsky to Kenneth Anger, Luigi Mangione to Ivy Wolk, knowingness offset by her keen sense of humour. After an unusually itinerant life, she is relatively settled in the city. Now 35, she was born in the US to an Austrian mother and Iranian father, who were IT workers in California, then spent her high-school years in Vienna and attended a conservatoire thanks to her brilliance on violin.
It left her with a musical mindset that is “very classically based”. She says she wouldn’t call herself a singer-songwriter. 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.” Aged 19, still long before she started writing songs, Royer went back across the world to work in Los Angeles at record label Stones Throw.
Did she feel American again? 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. I’m always just ‘part-’, right?” She’s also aware of how a mixed identity such as hers can be parcelled up 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 concept of female-only DJ nights. I know it’s not fully possible, but I would 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, as one of the first employees at Boiler Room, which has since become one of the world’s biggest music startups thanks to its brand-partnered livestreams of DJ sets.
Boiler Room ultimately took on major investment cash, and is seen as having sold out by many in the underground. An only child, Royer quit and moved back to Vienna to care for her and start her degree (plus another one, in painting, left incomplete). Alongside state-funded therapy, songwriting became a way to process.
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