Set your alarms, rodents; rat girl winter is coming. Meet London-based artist, SOFY, who reveals all about her brand new mixtape, Chaos & Commotion.
Take a peek at SOFY’s gloriously unhinged Instagram account and between the photos of herself carting around a lifesize cutout of Timothée Chalamet on the London Underground, random camera roll pics and performance / studio footage, you’ll find rats – lots of rats.
“I don't have a rat!” SOFY admits from her home in London. “The rat in the photos belongs to a friend of the photographer who took all of my press shots for this campaign. He had a friend with a rat, which we brought to the set because my fan base is called Ratworld. I can't remember how it happened, but it was something that was thrown around as a joke, and then it kind of stuck.
"Now everyone's wearing rat T-shirts and I'm taking pictures with rats…it's all got a bit out of hand. I'd love to have a pet rat, but my housemates would not be down for that. It's good for people to have something to hold on to, you know?” she deadpans. “You can't really have anything with Sophie; it doesn't really work. Sofas?” she suggests. “Nah!”
Hailing from a small village just outside of Leicestershire, SOFY moved to London after uni. Covid hit, and she found herself back in her hometown, where extreme boredom while on furlough led to her dabbling in basic production skills and exploring what she wanted to write songs about.
“I surprised myself when I randomly decided I wanted to become an artist in 2020, but when I actually think about it, it's not surprising at all because when I was a kid, I used to put on shows with my brother – I say put on shows with him, that's quite a loose term,” she interrupts herself. “I forced him to. We used to get tennis racquet guitars and I'd make tickets, write a setlist, make a poster for the door and stand at the door and sing through a whole Busted album. My parents would be sitting there like, ‘Cool’, but sometimes we would also make up our own songs.
"I remember I used to absolutely get into it and then not be able to divert from it at all. My brother or my cousin, or whoever I'd be doing it with would be like, ‘I'm bored now. Let's go and play something else’. Now, when I'm in a songwriting session, it makes me feel like I did when I was a kid when I was making up songs with my brother or my cousin,” she grins.