Flour Power: Inside the Creative Oven of Sofi Tukker’s Steamy New Album, “BREAD”

Sofi Tukker and bread: an unlikely pair, yet strangely kindred spirits in the all-you-can-eat buffet of life.

Both rise to the occasion, one on stage and the other in the oven, fermented by time and heat. One feeds our souls, the other our bodies. Sofi Tukker’s new album BREAD, however, does both.

BREAD is an acronym for “Be Really Energetic And Dance.” We’re ironically breaking bread over brunch on a sweltering Brooklyn summer afternoon, the kind where the subway grates spew dragon’s breath and even the pigeons seem sluggish.

Much like a fresh baguette, the album is best devoured immediately, still hot from creation. But with spicy imagery of assless chaps, microphone vibrators and fingers tracing tempting paths through hair, what happens to your stomach afterward—or, ahem, other body parts—is none of Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern’s concern.

However, for them, embracing outlandishness isn’t artistic masturbation—it’s evolution in action. Despite their album’s not-so-subtle erotica, they are proof of the magic that happens when raw talent and vulnerability meet.

“I feel I’m always on the edge of confidence and doubt,” Hawley-Weld says. “I can sometimes feel really confident about things and have a lot of doubt about them at the same time. I just feel both of them, maybe to the extreme honestly.”

It’s difficult, however, to scent even a scintilla of doubt when looking at the gown Hawley-Weld wore for the cover of BREAD. A masterstroke of surrealist fashion, the dress was developed by CHRISHABANA, whose pieces have been worn by Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Madonna, among other music icons whose legacies are canonized by ornate, dreamlike outfits.

But even with a pedigree like that, the East Village-based creative studio was caught off-guard by Sofi Tukker’s request to materialize their perception of bread, which the duo believes “conveys decadence, sex and making yourself happy.” That’s according to its eponymous founder, Chris Habana, who worked alongside stylist Anastasia Walker to bring the look to life.

“In our six or so years of doing costuming, we have been thrown a lot of intriguing requests and I have to say this one initially threw us for sure,” Habana tells EDM.com. “But after the first talk, it became such a fun project to dive into.”

Habana says the dress needed to travel, so his team couldn’t use real bread. They wanted to create each adornment by scratch, but with limited time, they had to purchase artificial food displays and ultimately sourced a selection of fake croissants, baguettes and other bread varieties.

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Like dough leavening in real time, a particular challenge arose when Habana had to carve up the “bread” in order to engineer the gown’s intricate breastplate.

“Manipulating the bread to create the arched breastplate was a challenge that my team thankfully figured out how to achieve by slicing the foam bread and wiring it on the inside,” Habana explains. “The sliced bread used in the floor length skirt that came in were all also one-tone white bread. I figured it would be more interesting to give them a toasted look. I ended up mixing various brown tones of paint and rolling and layering them over lightly on the textured surfaces. It looked like realistic toast in the end.”

In the end, it inconceivably took only 10 days for Habana and his team to design, construct and ship the daring dress to Brazil for the shoot. Hawley-Weld didn’t even know at the time if it would fit, she tells me. Maybe it was her unapologetic soul or her icy blue eyes that pierced through the veil of its absurdity—but she somehow pulled it off.

The gown delivered their vision while beautifully reflecting the vibrant music of BREAD, a sultry song-cycle of radiant house music and funk carioca with Brazilian and Portuguese influences. It also served as a reminder that music, fashion, food and sex each lose their savor when bound by too many restrictions.

To that end, the new album is what happens when artists embrace and submit to the most creatively unhinged versions of themselves. If “BATSHIT” was Sofi Tukker’s postcard from the edge of sanity, BREAD is their leap off the cliff.

With the ability to brazenly explore taboo concepts through a cerebral lens, they’ve become masters at transforming fun, irreverent subject matter into transcendental experiences for fans. Look no further than the wild music video for the album’s lead single, “Throw Some Ass,” where Halpern and Hawley-Weld bleed confidence and morph into piquant provocateurs before our eyes.

As hips gyrate and bare butts bounce in the video, the profane somehow becomes the profound. 

“We’ve typically taken risks in videos,” Hawley-Weld says. “When I decided to have an orgasm on the side of a mountain with just my guitar for a video or when we decided to do a ‘Center For Asses That Don’t Move Good’ with our asses out, we’re putting a lot of our own resources into these absolutely crazy ideas.”

“And then I always get really, really nervous and I feel like, ‘Oh my God, what have we just done?”

Filmed at the stunning Palácio das Laranjeiras in Rio de Janeiro, the audacious video is a reminder of why rules are meant to be broken. The same goes for the racy music video for the BREAD single “Spiral,” in which Heidi Klum co-stars.

Boldness is, after all, the yeast that makes timeless music rise. Consider David Bowie’s chameleon-like transformations or Björk’s alien soundscapes—weirdness is a weapon if you wield it with intention and purpose. That axiom rings especially true in 2024, a time when algorithm-approved playlists and focus-grouped releases make music irretrievably stale.

No one knows this more than Halpern, a former basketball star who says he often felt out of place in the locker room as he struggled to balance his love for the game with his desire for self-expression. He became his high school’s all-time scoring leader and a McDonald’s All-American nominee before playing college ball at Brown, where he captained his team.

“I was in a jock world,” he recalls. “I always had tendencies of being a little flamboyant with my style and out there and different from the other athletes, but I was still in that world and I had a lot of self-consciousness. I think about those sides of me and I’d get a lot of shit about it.”

“Seeing myself as an artist… it was a hard transition,” Halpern continues. “When I first told people, ‘I want to make music, I want to be a producer, I want to be a DJ, I want to be an artist,’ they kinda laughed at you. They’re like, ‘No, you’re in this box. You’re an athlete, you can’t do that.’ And it wasn’t until there was enough people believing in it that accepted me as an artist or accepted that I wasn’t just an athlete pretending to be an artist. Then I started feeling the freedom to dress how I wanted, to do my hair as I wanted, to just take risks and not give a fuck.”

It paid off. When Halpern and Hawley-Weld each hacked out their own convictions like deranged surgeons, they set Sofi Tukker up to scale heights reached by few in the dance music scene. They prophesied this captivating delirium through the first lyric of “Benadryl,” a haunting track they released back in 2018: “I lost my sanity with my socks.”

Just how far they intend to go from here remains to be seen and heard, but one thing is for sure: they are living proof that the most satisfying things in life often come from daring to deviate from the recipe.

BREAD is out now. You can listen to the album below and find it on streaming platforms here.

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