Hailing from Sandane in Norway, Sofia is a new artist who’s given herself the up-the-hill-backwards task of trying to make it in the music industry with an artist name which is going to be impossible to find on Spotify, Google or Facebook. Which is something that you really, and I mean genuinely, have to respect (and worked for MGMT I guess). She’s been behind the scenes in the Norwegian industry for a couple of years now, providing vocals and co-writing assistance on Coucheron‘s 2016 single Loud. Coucheron (who you may remember from his single UFO, or an even better piece of his work, the gentle tree-nudge video) has been a long-time collaborator of Sofia’s, and the duo have been in the studio recently working on her own music. Which has now resulted in a debut single, Fake It.

Fake It is audibly a Coucheron-produced product, with a couple of his distinctive stylistic tics, but Sofia has enough artistic presence and charisma to mark the song out as something different, something that’s very much her creative statement. Kicking off softly and slowly on piano, like it’s winding up for the acoustic and epic, the song quickly discovers its sense of freedom and fun as disco drums, guitars and bass kick in to transform it into a smooth, nimble and energetic pop song. Sofia’s voice is very much the star here, able to bring out the song’s melancholy while also retaining a sense of exuberance and riding the energy in the its rhythm and groove.

On the song, the artist says:

The chords came first, then the melody and lastly I made the lyrics. I don’t usually follow this recipe but with this song it worked out great. Actually, the inspiration for the lyrics came long before the chords. For a long time I had been singing ‘life is too short to do all your homework, I want to stick with more than just numbers’, an idea I came up with after thinking about how much time I spend worrying about things that don’t really matter in the long run.

I was trying to make a different song with those words, but found out I could rewrite the lyrics and use it in this song, where I only had chords and melody set. I then continued to write the lyrics and ended up with Fake It. So the song is actually a product of two ideas which I had thought would become two different songs, but I merged them into one. I brought the song to the studio in Sandvika and was lucky to have Coucheron producing it for me!

Fake It is out now on Toothfairy