New York, NY · dance-pop

SOFI TUKKER

2 upcoming festivals ↓

Jungle-pop party duo — bilingual bangers and permanent grins, 'Purple Hat' chaos with actual guitar chops.

SOFI TUKKER is a duo of Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern, formed in 2014 after the two met at Brown University. Their music sits between dance-pop and house, with guitar figures, live percussion and vocals that move between English, Portuguese and Spanish, an interest that grew out of Hawley-Weld's study of Portuguese and Brazilian music. The pair perform as a live act rather than a DJ set, playing instruments and singing over their productions.

Hawley-Weld was born in Frankfurt and grew up between rural Canada and Atlanta before attending a United World College in Italy, where her study of Portuguese pulled her toward Brazil. Halpern grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, and played basketball at Brown for three years, captaining the team, before an illness pushed him toward DJing instead.

Songs including "Drinkee", "Best Friend" and "Purple Hat" carried the duo beyond club and festival audiences: "Best Friend" ran in an Apple commercial for the iPhone X, "Drinkee" earned a Grammy nomination in 2017, and their album Treehouse was nominated for Best Dance/Electronic Album the following year.

"Drinkee" first appeared on the 2016 EP Soft Animals, its lyric adapted from a poem by the Brazilian writer Chacal, while the EP's title borrows a line from Mary Oliver. Their songs have since turned up in film and television, including The Incredible Jessica James, the trailer for Dead to Me and the soundtrack to Birds of Prey.

During the pandemic the duo began DJing from home, building the sets into a running livestream that passed 400 episodes by April 2021 and drew a fan community, the Freak Fam, who kept their own channels and Zoom parties going. They followed with the album Wet Tennis in 2022 and butter in 2025, the latter working through a range of Brazilian genres.

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dance-pop