Your bag is empty.
Sophie Hawley-Weld had just gotten off the phone and was feeling inspired. “I was talking to one of my best friends from college, and it was one of those conversations that filled me up so much,” explains Hawley-Weld, who along with musical partner Tucker Halpern, make up the aptly named dance duo Sofi Tukker. “Tucker happened to be in the garage making a beat and a bassline, and I ran in and was like, ‘I love my best friend so much. Friendship is the best thing in the world—let’s write a song about it.'”
Thus kicked off the creation of what would become the duo’s first No. 1 on the dance charts. The success of the thumping “Best Friend,” which features resounding brass, a Euro-house beat and a seemingly disembodied voice repeating “Yo, you wanna” (that’s Tucker, by the way), is the latest success for the duo after a string of them, and was built on a foundation of connection.
“It’s sort of that vibe when you’re in school and make a track with your friends, and it becomes your friend anthem,” Halpern says of “Best Friend,” which includes Japanese singer Alisa Ueno, as well as real-life musical buddies Nervo and The Knocks (more on them later). “We’re independent, so we don’t have a label telling us what to do. We kind of just do what we feel like, and this was a really exciting, fun thing. We’re about the good vibes, and what’s better than creating something with your friends?”
While the two met as seniors at Brown, the Ivy League university in Providence, Rhode Island, and for a time lived in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn before an endless touring schedule disrupted any sense of home, Sofi Tukker’s unique yet familiar atmosphere—whether on “Best Friend” or past breakouts “Drinkee” or “Johny”—sounds distinctly European. It’s a quality that perhaps can be traced to the fact Hawley-Weld was born in Germany, attended an international high school in Italy and became so infatuated with Brazilian music that she wound up living in the country for six months. In fact, she was readying to take up a permanent residence in the country to work as a yoga and music teacher when fate intervened.
“We had mutual friends, and I asked them, “Who’s this Tucker guy? Should I move to New York and start a band with him? Is this a good idea?””
“It was our senior year at Brown, and I was booked to DJ at an art gallery,” explains Halpern, who had taught himself the craft a couple years prior after finding himself bedridden due to Epstein-Barr virus. Hawley-Weld, by now a member of a bossa nova trio which scratched the itch for her passion for Brazilian music before departing to the country, was also booked at the same show.
“Tucker came early and saw me play, and kind of ended up remixing my sound on the spot,” she says. Quickly hitting it off, Halpern’s intuition promptly told him that the two should team up, and they began creating music together. The newly annointed Sofi Tukker were at least partly inspired by the success of recent Brown alum Nicolas Jaar, who’d be a party fixture on campus even while his music was rising up the charts.
It wasn’t long after combining forces when Ben “B-Roc” Ruttner and James “JPatt” Patterson, a duo experiencing their own success under the moniker The Knocks, caught wind of their early musical efforts. Remembers Tucker, “They were like, ‘Hey, you should move to New York and work out of our studio when we’re not there because what you’re doing is cool, and you should pursue this as a career.'” Encouraged, Tucker called his new friend and suggested that maybe she shouldn’t move to Brazil after all. “Looking back on it, I was probably crazy. But I get in these zones, and I believed in what we were doing and what we were making, so I was determined to make it happen.”
Hawley-Weld was skeptical, at least at first. “It was a tough decision for a couple of days. I didn’t know Tucker that well, and it was a risky thing to do. We had mutual friends, and I asked a couple of them, ‘Who’s this Tucker guy? Should I move to New York and start a band with him? Is this a good idea?’ And they all said, ‘Yeah!’ Even though it was a big change, it felt right.”
Two days before graduating from Brown and starting their new life in New York, Hawley-Weld and Halpern concocted the subtle yet affecting “Drinkee,” a number sung entirely in Portuguese and inspired by the Brazilian poet Chacal. It later become a global hit and was subsequently nominated for a Grammy in 2017 for Best Dance Recording.
While prepping for the release of their debut album, Treehouse (out April 13), Hawley-Weld and Halpern received word that Apple wanted to use “Best Friend” for … something. “We knew they wanted it to be in a commercial, but they never told us what it was,” says Halpern of the tech giant that is considered the holy grail of advertising syncs with its choice of music. While Apple used their aforementioned “Drinkee” in 2015, there weren’t even solid plans to make “Best Friend” a single before Apple’s music director came calling.
It wasn’t until last September, while watching Tim Cook give the company’s famous keynote, that they discovered the song was used to provide the soundtrack for the announcement of the iPhone X. “We found out the same time as the rest of the world, and were just like, ‘Oh, God.’ We thought it was going to be for their watch or something,” laughs Hawley-Weld.
It was yet another huge cosign for the song, which along with the rest of Treehouse, was made on the road and inspired by an amalgamation of Hawley-Weld and Halpern’s interests and personal experiences since Brown. “We’re not one of those bands who are going to take time off from touring to make an album—we kind of just write as we go,” explains Halpern, noting the name for Treehouse comes from an overarching vibe of creating a place you can escape to with your friends.
“It’s somewhere that has this freedom of expression,” says Hawley-Weld. “I think the more we get to know ourselves, other places and other people, the more we realized that that’s what really inspires us, keeps us going and makes us feel really alive. It’s exciting to put out music that captures that sentiment. It’s like, this is what we’re about, this is what we care about, these are the things that inspire us, and it’s all just the beginning.”
Sofi Tukker’s album Treehouse is available Friday, April 13. Click here to check out their latest video, “Baby I’m a Queen.”