Ever feel like you’re still waiting to grow up? Sofie Royer does: she’s often talked of feeling “permanently trapped in a coming-of-age,” a sentiment visible on all of her records and perhaps most obviously on her newest, Young-Girl Forever. Maybe it’s the transition from working office jobs in her twenties (including at Stones Throw, the eclectic label that now puts out her music) to the less fixed existence of being an artist in her thirties. Maybe it’s a requirement of being a female artist in a capitalist society. “Young forever but I’m also dying,” Royer sings, deadpan as you like, with just the faintest smudge of alarm.
Young-Girl Forever takes its name from the less catchily-titled Preliminary Materials for the Theory of a Young-Girl, a book originally published by French anarchist journal Tiqqun in 1999 that posits the “Young-Girl” as a character of modern-day consumerism. I’d normally balk at an album that wears critical theory so blatantly on its sleeve, but the songs within are not dense, try-hard, or overly intellectual – they’re fun.
And anyway, the Tiqqun text is pithy and almost zine-like in places, full of what Irwin in The History Boys would call “gobbets”, such as: “The Young-Girl never creates anything; All in all, she only recreates herself.” Or: “The Young-Girl is obsessed with authenticity because it’s a lie.” It eerily predicts vapid influencer culture and the way social media over-saturates, homogenises, and devalues creativity, making art less exciting.
“I wanna be an ordinary guy” might be the opening line to the new album, but it could also easily serve as a slogan for social media today: the content creators and influencers who make banality aspirational via an endless parade of Samba-clad selfies, Stanley water cups, and “day in the life of a corporate girlie” Instagram reels. Young-Girl Forever pokes at and participates in this modern world with an eyebrow raised, just as Royer always has done, whether deploying withering put-downs on 2022 single ‘Baker Miller Pink’ (“All she knows is copied from elsewhere / Not an original thought in that deliberately unbrushed head of hair”) or asking on 2023’s ‘Mio’, “Am I one in a million or one of a million?”
That playful astuteness is one of Royer’s best weapons, sharpened to a gleam since her 2020 baroque pop debut album Cult Survivor. There’s no surviving trace of the Pierrot figure who lent a tragicomic touch to her 2022 follow-up Harlequin. But like all of her records, beneath Young-Girl Forever’s surface lies a labyrinth of references – songs, poems, films, novels, places – that offer a constant rejection of insularity, an antidote to social media’s suffocatingly boring blanket. Within the first few lines of opening track ‘Babydoll’, there arrives a nod to ‘Heaven Is In You’, an obscure song by an even more obscure artist, Jamie Wilde: the moniker of Harry McKeown, brother of Bay City Rollers frontman Les McKeown. That’s just one of many rabbit holes you’re welcome to fall down, should you feel like it.
Royer is a classically-trained violinist turned Boiler Room DJ, artist, painter, and model, so it’s no surprise her music embraces all kinds of art forms. There’s a Rohmer-like quality to the music video for ‘I Forget (I’m So Young)’, and the video for ‘Indoor Sport’ recreates scenes of teenage romance in Bertolucci and Jarmusch films. But she extends that sense of Gesamtkunstwerk (a German term for “total work of art”, i.e. using different art forms to create a cohesive whole) to include herself, almost in the manner of Amalia Ulman, the artist who fooled the internet in 2014 with her performance piece, Excellences & Perfections, in which she curated an Instagram profile of a cutesy girl turned sugar baby turned wellness goddess — all Young-Girl archetypes. Royer’s not nearly as explicit as Ulman, but still constructs herself as an artwork to some extent. Instagram is a perfect medium for the Young-Girl, whose entire life is commodified, and Royer is a Young-Girl influencer with a Tiqqun-style side-eye: “Everything is funny, nothing’s a big deal. Everything is cool, nothing is serious.”
Some songs feature verses in French, others – such as ‘Fassbinder’ and the deliciously throaty ‘Nichts Neues im Westen’ (“nothing new in the west”) – are entirely in German, Royer’s mother tongue. She was born in California to Austrian-Iranian parents and can count London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, and now Vienna among her addresses. You hear traces of her international, multi-hyphenate existence throughout Young-Girl Forever, from cabaret to Italo disco, Morricone to Todd Rundgren, Jane Birkin to 10cc. Meanwhile, the Dire Straits-worthy, Brothers In Arms-era guitar riff on ‘Lights out baby, entropy!’ is evidence of the fact Royer never takes herself too seriously – she’s just having fun with it all.
Young-Girl Forever is that bit more polished than Cult Survivor, replete with autotune and elegant synth lines that execute the euphoric-melancholic thing very well. A drum machine pierces through the gauzy intro on ‘Young-Girl (Illusion)’ with all the vigour and drive of A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’. ‘Sage comme une image’, a cover of a 1982 single by Portuguese-Belgian singer Lio, recalls the sultry disco of Clara Luciani, and ‘I Forget (I’m So Young)’ somehow manages to contain an amalgamation of both the Bee Gees and Steps versions of ‘Tragedy’.
Of course, the irony is you end up influenced by Royer. You want to be her: so cool, so languid, delivering lines like “everyone’s out having fun / but not the kind of fun I want”, sparring with a lover in a boxing match, sprinting through the streets dressed as a sexy bunny, or cavorting around Swarovski’s Crystal World in Tyrol, Austria (I found myself Googling local boxing gyms and browsing eBay for bunny costumes.) Her world seems uncomplicated, seductive, youthful. Any existential doubts or esoteric references remain concealed within a straightforwardly good, fun pop album.
Therein lies the new record’s greatest strength. In an interview for Swedish culture publication Nuda earlier this year, Royer said, “One thing I realised when I was on tour playing shows was that a lot of my most popular songs are very slow and kind of sad sounding, and the stuff that I personally find the most fun to perform was the more dance-y, upbeat stuff. Why don’t I make a record that reflects that and see how that goes?” By that metric, she can count Young-Girl Forever as a triumph. As far as pop music goes, she’s certainly come of age.
