Sofie Royer keeps finding her way back to the stage

Flip the record over and the perspective widens: Royer is being crushed by the weight of herself, her own hand holding the boot. It initially began with a meme. “There was this kid that was being pushed into the mud by a boot in the image,” Royer recalls. “And then the second image is zoomed out, and he’s holding the boot.” She laughs. “That image really stuck with me.”

It’s a visual joke with an uncomfortable implication because of how true it can be. Sometimes, what feels like an outside force working against us is actually ourselves getting in the way. On before/after, Royer may be the main character in her world, but she’s also the director, pulling us into her internal coming-of-age monologues that feel as intimate as an exchange with a friend who trusts you with their deepest memories.

She reflects on the ways we get caught in an endless, repetitive chase for validation, as well as the ways we measure ourselves against who we’ve been or who we hope to become. “We’re constantly doing this,” she says of comparing versions of ourselves. “It’s not bad, or it’s not good. It’s just, I think, something that we use to measure growth or measure time.”

It’s a tension many of us face when trying to “live in the moment” while also pursuing the things that matter to us. Royer explores this on lead single “Sesquicentennial,” where she reflects on being in a “losing streak” with “all these roads leading nowhere.” But that’s not to say her outlook is completely bleak. “There’s nothing wrong that wasn’t wrong before,” she sings, a cheeky acknowledgement of the familiar frustrations that come with choosing this path in the first place. Even when Royer knows she’s on the hamster wheel, there’s something — ambition, desire, the spell of making music, or our own masochism depending on how you look at it as a creative — that keeps her invested.

It’s one of several contradictions that make before/after so clever. Royer’s songs are funny without leaning too far away from honesty, and lean into the absurdity that comes with leading a creative life. Nowhere is that clearer than “Sold Out the Jazz Club,” a theatrical, Sgt. Pepper-esque send-up of artistic ambition, mixed with Father John Misty’s cynical self-satire, in which she imagines herself willing to play virtually anywhere, even your uncle’s wake, as long as somebody lets her onstage. Eventually comes the confession: “There’s something wrong with me, I know it and I’m afraid.” She knows exactly how desperate the whole performance can look, but the other joke is perhaps that she means it.

“I’m too pop for the art world, too indie darling for the mainstream,” she sings, promising that one opportunity is all she needs to sell out the jazz club. Then comes another revealing punchline: she can’t believe she once made more money behind a DJ booth. Royer actually did spend years on the other side of that booth. By her late teens, she was in California, where she discovered a love of DJing.

She also helped establish Boiler Room in Los Angeles and worked as an executive at her now-label home, Stones Throw Records. After abruptly leaving the United States when her mother became ill around 2018, Royer returned to Vienna, enrolled at university and began studying philosophy, psychology and English as part of a teaching degree alongside art. Meanwhile, she was writing songs in her university’s basement.

“My former boss at Stones Throw was checking up on me and wanted to know what I was doing in Vienna. I told him about school and that I’d just been doing karaoke with my own songs in the basement,” she remembers. “He was like, ‘Well, I’d love to hear them.’ So I sent them over, and that became my first record, Cult Survivor.”

Three albums later, Royer has not drastically changed what feels unique to her sound and vision. As a classically trained violinist, she still brings the instrument she has played since childhood into her live show. She designs her own album artwork and vinyl layouts. She also builds her demos largely by herself, playing bass, guitar and whatever else is necessary to communicate the idea before bringing in other musicians if needed.

Her music videos are filmed on a camcorder, following Royer through the streets of Shanghai, hotel rooms and stages as though we’re watching intimate fragments of her life. David Lynch remains a major inspiration — “I love the element of the surreal,” she says — while “Cowboy Mouth” borrows its title from Patti Smith and Sam Shepard’s surreal 1971 play.

Rather than adapting its characters, Royer draws on the theatrics around performing and the ways it can shift identity. Her mysterious constructed character, named Angel Jane in the song, commands the microphone before something begins to feel off: the faces staring back are suddenly unfamiliar and, soon, she’s stranded in the spotlight, looking to the “stage cues” to tell her what she’s meant to be. The accompanying video extends that fascination with inhabiting different roles. Inspired by a photograph Jim Jarmusch posted of an abandoned box of shoes, it sees Royer trying on different pairs before taking the stage in angel wings. Trying on somebody else’s shoes becomes a literal expression of the different roles we inhabit.

For Royer, that visual extension is inseparable from the fun of making records. “In an ideal world, every single song would just have a music video, but there’s no money for that,” she laughs. Visuals, she says, offer “a really fun and special way to be able to visually communicate what your songs are about, which I think is sometimes easier than talking about it.” When I bring up her tongue-in-cheek description of being caught between pop, indie and the art world, as referenced in “Sold out the jazz club” she quickly zooms outward from her own career. “We live in postmodernity,” she argues. “Everyone’s cross-referencing, everyone has this wealth of references to draw upon,” she adds, before wondering aloud what innovation even looks like under those circumstances.

An example she cites is a track by Shoreline Mafia’s Phoenix Flexin, “Rubberz,” which had recently caught her attention. Delving into ’80s disco-style with a voice and sound that did not resemble Flexin’s previous hip hop sound, prompted online speculation about generative AI, which the artist vehemently denied, and, of course, generated further discourse about artists using AI in this way to boost publicity for their tracks. Royer doesn’t express much interest in litigating whether the song actually used AI, but rather what the conversation says about originality. It leaves Royer deliberately unresolved: “I get nervous because I’m hesitant to say, ‘Oh, there’s absolutely no innovation right now, and everything’s just post-postmodern,’ because it makes me sound jaded and cynical, when I’m actually not,” she says.

Royer doesn’t shy away from the ways she is similarly suspicious of easy answers on before/after. Even recognising our tendency to measure the present against what comes before or after doesn’t necessarily release us from it. “It’s like, ‘Hey, great. Like, I realise that I’m not in the moment, but what now?’” Royer says. “The whole way that society operates and is structured is set up to be anticipatory. We’re always in anticipation of the next day.” Contentment, she suggests, is hardly profitable: “If everybody’s content and happy and able to exist on very maybe simpler terms, capitalism wouldn’t really work.”

She expands on contentment in relation to the music industry, which has its own unforgiving cycle, as someone who’s been on the receiving end as an artist and as a music industry executive. Streaming and social media make success somewhat quantifiable, leaving artists confronted with their metrics instantly and subject to pressure, rather than trusting a process that takes time to show results. The push, as an artist, is to feel like you need to be accepted into every showcasing festival in pursuit of your lucky break, releasing single after single to land on playlists, more social media content in rapid succession so you can reach more listeners — it never ends. “God forbid you try to tour the same album for another summer,” Royer says. Festivals are already asking, “‘Well, when’s the next, new project out?’ It’s more about how relevant you are, if you haven’t released new music.”

before/after exists within that frustration. Royer doesn’t use self-awareness as a guarantee that things will be different, particularly when the systems around us set us up to feel dissatisfied. Just like knowing your patterns doesn’t automatically mean you’ll break them, and looking back at who you were won’t necessarily reveal who you’ll become next. Through all of life’s messiness, sometimes widening the frame is enough to see who’s holding the boot so we can acknowledge and reflect on why it’s there in the first place. In the meantime, Royer keeps showing up. She’ll be the pop artist at the jazz club, she’ll play your funeral, the karaoke bar, the industry showcase, anywhere as long as she’s on the stage. For all the rejection and uncertainty she finds in pursuing music, the desire to keep doing it remains remarkably uncomplicated. “If I get to keep doing this,” she says, “I’d be content.”