SoFTT

Arnau, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. We are answering from lovely Miami, Florida. The spring breakers have returned to college, thus the beach was a touch quieter today and we’re heading to London to start our run of European shows in three days! So things are very, very good.

I think the running theme of this project is the less we think about anything we do, the better it seems to go. So no, we did not think much about the name; we didn’t really think this would be anything more than a couple songs on Soundcloud we sent to some friends. The fact that we’re even having this interview is beyond what we could have imagined. But I will say sometimes, we try to figure out why we’re suddenly getting a ton of Instagram follows or something and it’s impossible, so we just let go and let god. I think making creative projects that are hard to monitor in real time is a good hack for mental health.

We first met in Los Angeles before either of us had moved to Florida. But in 2022, Kablito moved into my (Trevor’s) place in Miami as I was working in France and needed someone to sublet. Then, when I quit my job and returned to Miami, I was pretty burnt out and started making hard house and trance records to try to get some joy from creating again. Kablito had no idea I made music, and when I asked her to write something for a beat I made, I think she did it to be nice. That song became Kiero K Me Kieras, and as soon as it was done, we knew we made something cool but never thought it would get the best song of the year accolades it received.

After we made that song, we had to come up with a name for the project and we both were thinking a lot about how Miami and southern Florida had influenced us. It’s such an incredible and bizarre place; it’s basically a Latin American city surrounded by Trump country that a large part of Americans perceive as like Las Vegas with a beach. It’s obviously so much more than that, but we loved that Miami was so decadent, horny, Latin, and fun. Especially when so much of the US is the opposite right now. So I think we wanted to make music that reflected a culture that we felt had been slighted or considered low brow, when it has more humanity and depth than most of the copy-and-paste hipster culture you get in any urban American city at the moment.

We both come from singer-songwriter and ‘emo’ music, so the idea that hard dance and Eurodance could only have these throwaway lyrics when the best of it has this incredibly rich emotional musical palette seemed silly. It means a lot to see people with Kiero K Me Kieras tattoos or posting the lyrics on their Instagram stories and reflecting on what this song got them through. So in that sense, we wanted to make hard dance music for soft-hearted people. Music for us, basically.

We’ve been playing and programming a lot of guitars for the new stuff, and this one came about really easily. Lyrically it’s kind of a take on the ‘look at me now, I made it’ kind of records that you see in corridos or hip-hop, so it was fun to do that from a 160 bpm rave record. Sonically, we’ve been going in the studio and asking ourselves, what would Tegan & Sara do? But this obviously has some corridos inspiration and will probably act as a nice bridge from the stuff we were making in 2023 and what’s coming at the tail end of 2024.

That’s so nice to hear. I think because we both started making music in our teens, when we turn our brains off and just go, we revert to chords, lyrics, and feelings that feel teenagery. There’s a naivety in all of it where we just try to go and let what feels right guide us, even with releasing music we’re just throwing it out when it’s done. Sometimes there’s a music video, sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes our friends finish remixes in time to be a part of the release cycle, and sometimes those remixes come out in the middle of another release. We’re just gonna try to put out things that feel good when they’re done.
That said, right now I find we’re making a lot of guitar-driven music and who knows how people will take it, we think it feels good, and hopefully JaJaJa is a portal into that world for the current fans and anyone who wants to come for the SoFTT ride.

I like that you said concert/DJ set because it’s definitely somewhere in between. Kablito sings live and I DJ, we try split up our sets about 50/50 with our original music/edits and music made by other artists. And while the goal is slightly different every night, I think we always try to construct a SoFTT-core world primarily aurally, but increasingly visually as well. That means a lot of Latin music, a lot of club anthems, a lot of tempo.

“Literally no one knows anything” is a good one. It’s easy to be overly cerebral about any of this stuff, but the culture industry and increasingly all of life feels like a dice roll. Just make things you love, put them out in the world, take care of the people around you, and hope for the best. Also “a win is a win.”

I think we both really appreciate having each other through all of this, especially as the touring has kicked off. It’s been a dream to travel, play music, and meet new friends. We’ve both worked on our previous solo projects and those felt really high stakes and high pressure. This just feels like a surprise we’ve stumbled into together, so we’re approaching it as if it could go away at any moment and focusing on having fun. I also think the things we worry about individually, the other person has a good grasp on. In that way we can really let go of the stressful stuff and hope as a team we can navigate obstacles.

Those are made by our friend Eleazar aka Sob Story. I wish there was a master plan there, but we both really love his work and felt like it represented the music well. We give him a cue on what we want it to look like and he comes back to us with little masterpieces that we photograph and throw on Spotify.

We’re going to announce an EP in the near future. I don’t know if an album will come, but maybe we’ll have to bundle all these songs up at some point so I can give my mom a vinyl. She would appreciate that. As for 2024, a lot more music and a lot more touring! We’ve just signed with an agent for North America and have been getting some inbound from agents in Australia and Asia. So hopefully, we’ll get to Asia this year. That would be a dream.