Sophie and the Giants want to reclaim pop music for the masses.
Sophie Scott, lead singer and namesake of Sophie and the Giants is a big defender of pop music and finds it baffling as to why so many people are “turned off” by the genre. “There are so many incredible things that you can do with pop music, I think it’s a shame that some radio stations really marginalise it and make it one thing where it all sounds the same, but when you really delve into it, there’s such a broad spectrum of what pop is.” Pop can be old-school and modern, upbeat and mellow, cheerful and angry; and that is what Sophie loves about it, “that there is such a wide spectrum of pop music and it brings in influences from so many other genres.”
After a whirlwind year of success, we spoke to Sophie and caught up on the events of 2020 and how they’ve altered the band’s course thus far. In April of last year when most of us were stuck inside twiddling our thumbs in anticipation of our release, Sophie and the Giants dropped the track Hypnotized with Purple Disco Machine. This subsequently blew up all over Europe and led to wild summer of playing colosseum stadiums and holographically performing on the X-Factor Italy. It has been a strange year, to say the least, and an even stranger one to globally hit gold and platinum record status. The band lived out this freaky fame fantasy in a bubble which allowed them to process and adjust to the new status, but they are now ready for the real thing.
Over the course of the year, the band image and sound has evolved and developed, thanks in part to the year of online living. “We have had a lot of time on our hands to nurture whatever we are growing into, which is nice. For me personally, it’s been crazy as I’ve been able to experiment and make loads of mistakes in the comfort of my own home and the world doesn’t need to know about it. I’ve had so much time on my hands to mess around with how I look, how I dress and also with my song writing as well. I think that the way everything happened with Hypnotised was a big eye opener as it happened so quickly for us and it happened at a stage when we were still developing. It sorted of felt like ‘fuck we need to get our shit together’…we hadn’t quite figured out exactly what we wanted yet.”
The rebrand attitude has certainly worked wonders with the band, as Sophie tells me “At the moment we all feel quite locked in together and we feel really strong and really happy with what we are doing. It might be the first time we have all been on the same page and we are like ‘fucking hell’ we all really love what we are doing right now.” The ability to experiment with sound and become more risk-taking is always a scary prospect, but with the pandemic “it has made us think ‘fuck it’, whatever we want to do, we need to fucking aim high and try and do it. We have been caring a little less about what people will think and trying out new things and I think it’s been really good because now we are totally different but still us, a more defined version of ourselves.”
Although they’ve explored a new sound, they are reluctant to let go of the pop genre that they’ve been identifying with since their creation. We spoke a lot about how it’s easy to cast aside the quintessential genre and to forget that pop is just popular music. “People turn their nose up at pop and think that you’re just taking an easy route into music. Other musicians don’t really see you as musicians.” But having now written for different genres, Sophie can attest that “the hardest thing to do is to write a successful pop song.” Pop blends a combination of lyricism, storytelling and universality and when it comes down to it “Regardless of what box people put us in, we just want to help people and make music and have a good time whilst we’re doing it!”
Sophie and the Giants latest track Right Now is out right now, so take a listen below.
