The Pop Corporation

Sofie Royer is back with her third LP, and there’s been something of a departure. The previous albums were almost bedroom pop, with singer-songwriterness floating through her songs. She was always super cool, super smart and albums switched between existential dread and quiet feistiness.

With this set of songs, she emerged not with a moody, too-hip-to-smile song but rather, a discoball synthpop jam that was initially jarring, but a refreshing left turn, it transpired. With ‘I Forget (I’m So Young)’, we heard Sofie bop-and-weave around a four-to-the-floor beat, where once she would have been a little more retiring.

With ‘Young-Girl Forever’, it’s a more glittery audio affair, but thematically, she’s still going in for the heavy stuff. Amongst the songs, you’ll listen to her ruminate on dread, capitalism, yearning, switching languages and allowing her ideas to skip around which she explores the feelings she’s having.

We live in a weird time, and it’s only fair that someone like Royer would want to explore everything. The fact that she’s on LP 3, and she’s just finished up a degree in philosophy and teaching, it’s little wonder she’s got a lot to process with that big brain of hers.

She says of the LP: “In all my records, there’s this theme of me feeling permanently stuck in a coming-of-age. I probably felt more of an adult in my 20s, when I still had an office job. Now that I work as an artist, it all feels bizarre and arbitrary and regressive. It can be a kind of anarchistic existence, where there’s no rhyme or reason to my schedule, so this album deals with feeling anchorless.”

Where Royer shines though, is her ability to take big ideas and not make them inaccessibly chewy. You’d probably run a mile if someone told you that they’d made an album based on a French anarchist’s book called ‘Preliminary Materials for the Theory of a Young-Girl’, however, Royer isn’t your average songwriter. She’s looking at the world through a cynical lens for sure, and while this album feels different from the excellent debut ‘Cult Survivor’ and the follow-up ‘Harlequin’, all her references of movies, songs, poems, whatever, feel more pointed and sharp here.

She’s working through the feelings of being a young woman – both cherishing it and the loathing of it. It’s a tricky landscape and Royer walks through it with enough originality to make for a captivating body of songs. She’s not the first person to screw her face up thinking about lousy dates, cringeworthy choices and whatnot, but she’s certainly processing them in a way that we’re not hearing anyone else doing, and that’s worth listening to.

As an album, it’s a rather gentle affair with some cool simmering tension in there. The synths swirl and the melodies bruised and pretty – it can sound a little like Sad Tumblr Girl – The Musical, but as aesthetics go, it really is an engaging one, and one that many have tried to capture and failed at.

When she sings “so why am I being kept away, another sleepless night upstate”, it shows a cinematography in her writing that pricks your ears up, just like the magically gloomy “everyone’s out having fun – but not the kind of fun I want.”

Sofie Royer is always someone worth listening to and, with her third outing, you should plug in and see what she has to say.