Sofi Tukker Makes Partying Look Easy

They’re on a yacht off the coast of Croatia. No, they’re playing Belgium’s Tomorrowland for thousands of ravers. No, they’re boarding a plane to Palm Springs for a music festival. No, they’re actually in different locations — one is posting an Instagram story from bed in New York City while the other is at the beach in Florida. They’re Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern, better known as the musical duo Sofi Tukker, and this summer, they are impossible to pin down.

But miraculously, I’ve done just that. The morning sun is bright in Halpern’s bedroom at his home in Las Vegas — too bright, in fact, backlighting their shared laptop screen — but for artists who make a living soundtracking late nights and poolside hangs, they seem unexpectedly chipper about this pre-breakfast chat. Hawley-Weld, in a red workout set, sips homemade matcha through a straw. Halpern runs a hand through his bleached-blond hair. “We’ve been on calls for the last couple hours, and then we’re rehearsing for a jazz festival,” Hawley-Weld says. “We currently have a house full of, like, 10 people.”

“Luckily I hadn’t furnished the living room yet,” Halpern says, “in hopes that we would either have dance parties — or rehearsal.”

Those appear to be the only two modes of life for Sofi Tukker, but they pack in so much more. In the decade since they launched one of electronic music’s most vibrant partnerships — featuring a sound that spans thumping house, Brazilian funk, and alt-leaning dance-pop — they have been surprising listeners, and even each other, with the expansive shape their joint career has taken. Consider, for instance, a sampling of bookings that took place in just a fortnight this summer: a lucrative residency at the Wynn Las Vegas’ XS Nightclub, where they DJ regularly for bottle-service-and-sparklers types; a live set at Colours of Ostrava, a music festival in Czechia, where headliners included Sting and Iggy Pop; and an appearance at that aforementioned jazz festival, the Newport Jazz Festival, to play an acoustic show of bossa nova-inspired renditions of their 2024 album, Bread, for a notably more sedate crowd.

“Being in this band is what I imagine a marriage feels like.”

Today, in preparation for that show, the mood is buzzing. “I am on cloud nine. I’m in heaven. Because the thing that I love to do the most is sing and dance,” Hawley-Weld says. But first, some literal housekeeping: She keeps glancing at her phone — her new bed is getting delivered to Halpern’s house any minute, and she’ll have to dip out to let in the delivery person. If it sounds odd to be getting a bed installed in the home of her platonic business-slash-creative partner — well, they are aware.

“Being in this band is kind of what I imagine a marriage feels like,” Hawley-Weld says, only half-joking, as Halpern raises an eyebrow at her. “You have a goal larger than all the little disagreements. It’s like cooking something for a long time: The flavor deepens.” And so while Hawley-Weld is figuring out her own living arrangements (her New York City apartment is about to go on the market, a fact she announces over Instagram a few days after our chat), she gets to crash with Halpern and make a space of her own in his home. “I might just leech,” she says. (“She’s going to have to start paying some rent, though,” Halpern jokes.)

“So many people miss out on a relationship like this because they’re just not used to platonic hetero relationships and think it has to be sexual,” Halpern says about their unconventional partnership. (For the record, he has a girlfriend, whom he mentions casually.) “But I’ve learned so much from Sophie — about relationships, about perspective. It’s changed me as a person.”

The two met as students at Brown University and were an unlikely pair when they started making music together: She was studying Portuguese and international development; he was a star basketball player trying to find a new focus after a debilitating illness kept him off the court. But they quickly found their way to a style that stood out. On their Grammy-nominated debut single, 2015’s “Drinkee,” Hawley-Weld sang poetry from Brazilian writer Chacal in its original Portuguese over a guitar riff that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Talking Heads track. In 2017, their song “Best Friend” (with The Knocks, Nervo, and Alisa Ueno) got the Apple boost in an iPhone X commercial. The duo’s clear braininess is matched by a willingness to be totally unserious when the occasion calls for it; in the music video for “Throw Some Ass,” Hawley-Weld playacts as a medical patient with a very specific complaint.

“A lot of people end up becoming jaded. If you’re partying and hungover every day, you’re not going to enjoy the day.”

“I would consider myself very carefree when I’m on stage — but only because we’ve done all the preparation and put all the care into it backstage to set the grounds,” Hawley-Weld says. “I like being ambitious in all aspects of life. It’s really exciting to think of it that way, to be like, ‘OK, I’m ambitious about my health. I’m ambitious about my relationships. I’m ambitious about our career. I’m also ambitious about my morality.’”

But is that kind of raw ambition cool? “It’s so fun to take things as far as you can take them. You’re only alive once — why not be ambitious?” Hawley-Weld says.

“I would go further and say, I think it’s uncool not to be ambitious,” Halpern adds. “Right now, in this period of my life, I’m most ambitious about seeing Sofi Tukker’s potential. I definitely want to see how far we can take it. We have discussions all the time of, like, What does that mean to you? What is ‘taking it to the highest potential’? Does it mean playing in stadiums, or does it mean making an impact?” Hawley-Weld nods along with his philosophical sideline, which mirrors her own questions; she’s been reading a book called Moral Ambition and has even been in touch with its author, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman.

This summer, the duo expanded its own Animal Talk record label to include a management company of the same name, in partnership with Palm Tree Management (which was founded by Kygo and his longtime manager, Myles Shear). The new Animal Talk will be part lifestyle/fashion brand, part festival/party organizer, and part talent incubator for new artists. The name is a riff on a famous Mary Oliver poem that reminds readers to “let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.” To wit, they want to “lean into the dance culture more,” Halpern says, and play at major club venues they’ve yet to explore. Let them love what they love.

They’ve reimagined their artistic direction: leaning into DJ sets over traditional live shows. “We were like a band, you know? We weren’t known as DJs until really post-pandemic,” he says. It’s a new strategy that lets them travel and perform without the hassle of extensive daily sound checks and other logistical difficulties. “Definitely more sustainable,” says Halpern. Plus, he adds, “there’s so much more time to enjoy being in Europe. We never had that.”

“It’s true,” agrees Hawley-Weld. “It’s the difference between showing up early at a venue and being in a dark venue all day. Like, we used to set up ourselves. We did everything. And now—”

“Now we actually have space to create,” says Halpern. “We can spend that energy making new music, producing, experimenting - really focusing on the art instead of the logistics.”

“I think it’s uncool not to be ambitious.”

Part of the appeal of Sofi Tukker is this obvious camaraderie, the sibling-level comfort they share. “It is cool how we’re on the same page,” Halpern says. “Different interests, different ways of spending time, but we’re actually always pretty much on the same page about Sofi Tukker stuff.”

They’re even on the same page about how to have fun right now. It’s been a Euro summer — Spain, Romania, Austria — but what they’re really craving at the moment is good old American lake life. “A friend of ours was at a lake for a while and their Instagram was just them on the boat, on the dock, with family and friends, wakesurfing,” Halpern says. For a minute, they debate if they’ve been on a lake together before. They conclude they haven’t, which is shocking to both. “We need a lake in our lives,” Hawley-Weld says. (A few days later, per their own Instagram, they will get their wish between gigs in Canada and Rhode Island.)

“So many people miss out on a relationship like this because they’re just not used to platonic hetero relationships and think it has to be sexual.”

It takes a lot of work to make fun look this easy. Even while hopscotching across Europe on a tour bus, Hawley-Weld swears by her routines. “It’s the relatively boring stuff, like when you wake up, I try to see sunlight, and I work out no matter where I am in the world,” Hawley-Weld says. (“And when she doesn’t, you know — because you get grumpy, Sophie,” Halpern chides.) There’s the matcha she makes every morning, a longstanding habit: “Before it was trendy? Oh, a hundred percent! I've been on the train for a long time,” she says, “and it makes a big difference to me.” There’s also her attempt to eat three meals at the right times of day. Hawley-Weld even convinced Halpern to switch to almond milk in his beloved iced lattes. “She was sending me all these Instagrams of how bad oat milk is with all the oils and sh*t,” he says, shooting her a look. (Also a subject of ire: the lack of sufficiently iced lattes to be found while on tour in Europe.)

They’ve both had serious health scares, which profoundly shaped the beginnings of their music careers — and may even explain their shared intensity toward their craft. Halpern’s promising basketball career was cut short by a diagnosis of the Epstein-Barr virus, which can cause extreme fatigue. During a few bedridden months, he started teaching himself how to produce and make beats. Hawley-Weld, meanwhile, spent four months in a wheelchair after college due to stress fractures in her toes that left her unsure if she would walk again. She also passed the time by learning Ableton, a music software.

And then there’s their shared efforts to stay feeling healthy. “I’ve been sober this full time and I think that has saved me,” Hawley-Weld says of forgoing substances since around age 21. Halpern adds that he’s “basically sober now too, just from wanting to feel good.” Because you can’t put on a show when you’re not in top form. (Halpern is also 6’7”, which makes getting a good night’s sleep on a tour bus elusive.)

You’d never know their limits when they bounce onstage, though. “One of the ways we’ve sustained so well is that we love what we do,” Halpern says. “We get off stage, and we’re happy and grateful that we got to do it. A lot of people end up becoming jaded, and I think one of the reasons is — if you’re partying and hungover every day, you’re not going to enjoy the day.” The preparation is the lifestyle, and the performance is the peak; the party scene around them is just set dressing. “Treating it like we’re athletes is important,” says Hawley-Weld. “If I wasn’t a touring artist, I would be running marathons.”

During the pandemic, quarantined together in Florida, the pair started broadcasting daily DJ sets from their home base. Viewers called themselves the “Freak Fam” and would tune in regularly, creating online communities of their own. With nearly a million followers combined on Instagram alone, social media has always been important to the pair, but they’re concerned about the way that algorithms have shifted — and about losing that direct line to their community. “Literally, half an hour ago before we started this call, I was talking to our manager about this,” says Hawley-Weld. “I think a lot of people right now are feeling pretty disillusioned with social media. I think it feels less and less like a form of connection.” So they’re trying to experiment — she publishes an email newsletter now — and they still post all their content themselves.

A highlight this summer was a carousel of memes they put on Instagram, which paired captions like “me: omw to steal your girl” and “me: be a cool dj” with a picture of Halpern, in the water off the coast of Croatia, grinning broadly in geeky sport glasses as he clutches a sea scooter. There’s something childish and pure in the pic — and something delightful about their willingness to poke fun at it. Zoom out on that photo, and you’d find them perched on a friend’s yacht, sharing an afternoon off between gigs with fellow star DJs John Summit and Martin Garrix. It’s a fever dream of “cool kid” celebrity party setups, populated by the world’s most in-demand vibe-setters. But zoom in, and it’s clear that Hawley-Weld and Halpern are just having a damn good time.

Top image credit: On Sophie Hawley-Weld: R13 top, Prada jacket, Rabanne skirt, and Alexandre Vauthier shoes from Albright Fashion Library, W.Kleinberg belt; On Tucker Halpern: Sons of Gemini jacket and jeans, John Smedley top, Tom Ford sunglasses, Nike shoes