Into Music Album Review: Sofie Royer – Young-Girl Forever

Sofie Royer – Young-Girl Forever (Released on Stones Throw 15 November 2024)

When Duglas T Stewart, leader and vocalist of the BMX Bandits approached Into Creative with the idea to write a review on a new album we were of course, intrigued. We hadn’t heard of the artist Sofie Royer before, but we sure have now, and our musical world is a richer place for it. Royer’s new album, Young-Girl Forever, is released on 15 November 2024 and we cannot wait to hear more of this amazing Austrian artist. So, read on and devour Duglas’s review. We know you’ll be seeking out this amazing album upon its release!

Sofie, born and raised in California to Iranian and Austrian parents, has been making music for a long time. She was entered into violin competitions from the age of three (explaining the album cover image). Sofie studied violin and viola at the Vienna Conseratoire. She moved to New York, London and Los Angeles and during this time through her D.J. sets and involvement with The Boiler Room she became recognised as a tastemaker. Sofie moved back to Vienna, playing in orchestras while making her own music and exhibiting her striking visual art. Sofie Royer has an artist’s heart, she’s the real deal.

The album title Young-Girl Forever comes from Tiqqun, an end of the 20th Century French Anarchist journal that has the “Young-Girl” as a genderless role but with traits traditionally associated as being feminine. This Young-Girl is someone who participates in society and therefore reinforces its existence. Through her songs, Sofie explores this eternal internal struggle, with emotional intelligence and great creativity. She also explores love, insecurities and a whole lot more. It has many layers to it but it manages at the same time to be an album full of glorious life affirming pop music.

When I first heard the album title I hadn’t heard of Tiqqun and so my thoughts initially went elsewhere, to Serge Gainsbourg, a key influence on Royer (and on myself). From 1969 to 1980, while they were in a relationship, the songs that Gainsbourg wrote for, and about, Jane Birkin cast her as an archetypal beautiful young girl, the muse and object of obsession for the older male artist. In 1965 Gainsbourg won the Eurovision Song Contest with Poupée de cire, poupée de son, sung by France Gall. Gall sang about being a puppet, a rag doll singing and performing as her puppet master, who could be read as being Gainsbourg, pulls her strings. Although Sofie is a fan of those records and recognises their brilliance, she doesn’t need anyone pulling her strings, she is her own master and creator. Sofie is not just the singer and songwriter, she is the album’s producer and arranger and plays the majority of instruments on it. The album includes a cover Sage Comme Un Image, originally recorded by Lio, who was part of that classic lineage of “young girls” in French pop who had a combination of perceived innocence and playful sensuality. The song is from the perspective of a young girl who is wiser than the men gazing at her may suppose. Sofie’s version lifts it to another level musically. It takes away the tweeness that was present in the original, giving the song a sophistication and elegance that brings out its true pop potential.

The album opener, Babydoll, feels like a door is opening to a world of the night, of seduction and we are being drawn into an intimate view of another life. The song curiously references the mostly forgotten Scottish pop star, Jamie Wilde, who was the brother of The Bay City Rollers’ singer Les McKeown. If you pick up on the reference it’s an added bonus, a little detail that makes the world that Sofie’s creating feel more real. This song sets a tone that we keep being drawn into throughout the album. Sofie’s songs have a vivid cinematic quality to them. There is real depth, emotional honesty and humour in her writing. Sofie has such a great knowledge and understanding of her art. She has all of this classical music, obscure and main stream European and American pop deep inside her, just waiting to be accessed and made new. Her music manages to capture emotional truths and nuances most artists could never hope to get close to in their work.

The almost title track of the album Young-Girl (Illusion) is total pop. As Sofie confided in me, it is tipping its hat to 10cc, with Sofie being both our Lol Crème and Kevin Godley, two different voices offering advice from two separate perspectives. I love its elegance but it also tears me apart. It feels like it’s dealing with a matter of life or death or perhaps something even more important. This is a song to dance away the tears to. Sofie brings me willingly into the world contained in her songs and I totally buy into the truth of them.

Keep Running is another track that has a big emotional impact on me. To my ears there’s echoes of later eighties Christine McVie Fleetwood Mac songs in there but whatever the influences are (or not), Sofie’s own artistic voice is always the strongest ingredient in the mix. In a parallel world this could be the big song from a movie blockbuster of an era in cinema that sadly no longer exists.

When Indoor Sport comes along I’m grateful for its soothing sensual beauty and playful romance. But don’t be fooled, there’s still plenty of depth in this song. There’s still poignancy, regret and longing in both the notes and in the words.

I Forget (I’m So Young), the lead single from the album, is a sublime, hypnotic, dizzying song. There are shades of Ze Records-flavoured Mutant Disco but mixed with something you generally wouldn’t associate with that genre, a naked vulnerability and emotional content that’s off the charts. Some of that vulnerability comes from the lyrics and Sofie’s lead vocal performance but it’s also there in the brilliance of the composition and arrangement. There’s something about the circular structure that feels like running down a never-ending spiral staircase. It reminds me of a couple of my favourite compositions by Ennio Morricone, 1971’s Come Maddalena and 1969’s Metti Una a Sera a Cena. And like the latter, it has a heightened sense of sensuality running through it. How the elements of the song come together feels like some form of musical alchemy. Listening to this I feel like I have been infected with a beautiful disease, I don’t want a cure for it. I am glad it’s now part of me, part of what I am.

I’ve not come close to managing to cover everything that makes this music, this album so special for me. There’s Lights Out Baby, Entropy! with its total pop killer hook. Oh how my heart beats faster when it transitions between verse and chorus. Now I have to tell you about Ghost Town, it has such a beautiful sadness about it. Emotionally it covers similar ground as one of Todd Rundgren’s most underrated masterpieces, Tiny Demons, but Sofie’s song goes even deeper for me, so deep it’s almost a part of me. There is something so fragile in there which makes me think of the teenage Nora Guthrie’s extraordinary 1967 single Emily’s Illness. Ever since I first heard that track I’ve felt haunted by it and that’s how I also now feel about Sofie’s Ghost Town. The loneliness of this song connects with me so completely, being haunted by one’s self, the regrets and feeling of isolation. That’s where the true magic lies in the greatest music, in how deeply it connects with you.

So has Sofie Royer done it again? She certainly has (I hear applause and cheers). It’s my album of the year but it also goes way beyond just being that for me. This is music that has been created by someone, that all the evidence would suggest is so very different from me, their life experiences, their world. They are also at such a different stage in their life but rather extraordinarily they have created music that feels like such a good friend to me. When I’m in the company of this music I feel better about the world, about everything. I feel hope, I feel a connection, I feel more alive and less alone and I am grateful for that. I hope you will listen to Sofie’s music and that it connects with you in some way.

Sofie forever.

Duglas T Stewart

Photos of Sofie by Jasmin Baumgartner. Photo of Duglas by Mark Gillies.