Sofi Tukker's commitment to advocacy work is making the EDM duo a powerful hyphenate: musician-activists.
The band, which consists of Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern, is partnering with non-profit PLUS1 to donate $1 from every ticket sold on their worldwide TreeHouse tour to Planned Parenthood. It may not sound like a lot — but the tour's first leg of 27 stops has already raised $20,000.
"I am so grateful to Planned Parenthood. It’s a big part of my life and all of my friends’ lives," says Hawley-Weld. "To be able to give back what ended up being a significant contribution felt really, really powerful."
As the band has grown creatively, the ethos of Sofi Tukker has become clear. Inclusivity and progressive values are at the core of their dynamic, as well as an integral component of every show they play.
"The first goal is to make it feel like we’re all in something together, rather than that we’re just performers on a stage and people are coming to watch, it’s really important to us to involve everybody there," says Hawley-Weld. "So we have a lot of call and responses and dances and we bring people up on the stage and we go dance in the audience."
This commitment to inclusivity doesn't happen automatically. Sofi Tukker deliberately places it into their albums and shows — there's even a point at every show in the TreeHouse tour when they encourage everyone in the audience to hug each other.
"We named our most recent album TreeHouse and what Treehouse means to us is having a safe space where you can be yourself," says Halpern. "That’s sort of the environment that we create at our concerts that feels really inclusive and like there’s one connection between everyone."
That connection, along with the success of their first fundraiser, has inspired the duo to do more and continue their activism. Later in the tour, Sofi Tukker will also be donating to The Trevor Project, a national 24-hour, toll-free confidential suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth. They've also registered people to vote at their larger concerts in a partnership with HeadCount.
"So many people hadn’t registered yet, that it actually worked. People were like, ‘It’s right here, it’s easy.’ It’s cool to see what we can actually do with small amounts of change to what we’re doing," says Halpern. "It’s exciting to feel like we’re making a difference more than the music."
But the music will keep coming — the duo is almost impulsively prolific. They're wrapping up their album, releasing more music and preparing for their next single to drop this Friday. Sofi Tukker will also continue to tour, traveling around Europe to different festival starting in July.
"We just have gotten to create spaces night after night after night, in different cities around the world that, for us at least, feel like the antithesis of what we’re reading and hearing about in the news," says Hawley-Weld. "So it feels extremely urgent right now, and it did have this really organic beginning."
