On the Rise
Sophie Thatcher

For weeks, she had this freak dream about her tooth, which she lost in an accident a few years ago. In the dream, she’d keep replaying warped versions of real life where her tooth would fall out over and over again. In another, she’d watch a man spit out his food and his teeth would immediately turn black. In yet another, she’d throw herself into glass and emerge ridden with bruises and cuts.

But instead of running from the dreams, the 23-year-old performer built them into the bittersweet world of Pivot & Scrape. Her debut EP, the collection toes the line between nightmares and nostalgia. Its imagery, she acknowledges, is dark and gritty, but it’s also, she hopes, comforting, too. After all, leaning into the theatrical and the off-kilter is always where Thatcher has felt most like herself.

Thatcher’s early childhood was spent in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Later on, after her brother started getting bullied in school, they moved to a secluded area outside the city. “We moved to Lake Forest, which is this crazy suburb that’s very preppy and very Republican. I definitely felt pretty outcast there,” she says.

That feeling, she explains, planted in her “an innate need to perform and create characters.” Whether it was writing short stories, performing in plays, taking vocal lessons, drawing, or making home-recorded feature films with her twin sister Ellie, everything artistic became an escape. She got her hands on anything that offered her a creative outlet. Her eventual growth into an entertainment industry multi-hyphenate, then, was less a stroke of luck than it was a step into what she knew she was destined for. It was the product of years of hard work and self confidence that are now paying off in multitudes.

That it was acting Thatcher fell into first was more a matter of convenience than any real conviction or sense of priority. “It kind of just became a thing, because it could have really been anything,” she says. “I fell into it because I was really competitive and really wanted this one role. I was like, ‘I’m gonna get this or I’m gonna die.’”

The opening was a shot at playing Mary Lennox in a musical adaptation of The Secret Garden. Set in the British empire at the turn of the 20th century, the story deals with childhood loss, abandonment, and isolation – and yet, it’s also whimsical, fantastical, and heartbreakingly uplifting. Even after all that Lennox goes through — the death of her parents, the neglect of her uncle, her own angst — she finds in the Secret Garden a way to breathe, to be herself, and to thrive.

Playing eight shows a week at the age of eleven, parts of Lennox — her attitude, her taste, her world — and parts of Thatcher grew naturally intertwined. “Looking back, it did inform my taste. It’s very Victorian,” she says, a nod to her current Tim Burton-esque aesthetic sensibilities. It was also Thatcher’s first major professional acting experience, and it quickly eclipsed all else.

“It ran for seven months, and of course there were matinees, so I couldn’t be in school,” she explains. “I was always out of school, and I think that’s what made me realize that I was so serious about it. I mean, I was behind as fuck school, and I was such a perfectionist that it was really anxiety inducing.”

Such was the cycle of Thatcher’s adolescence. She went in and out of phases of being in school and homeschooling as her acting schedule demanded. Eventually, she left for good, and she finished her high school education alone with her mom. The sense of being a social oddity that she’d carried with her since her move to the suburbs grew, with her time spent mostly either with adults or alone.

“I was just home all the time and very isolated and smoking a lot of weed,” she says. “I felt so isolated and pretty fucking depressed. Because, I know that I’m pretty introverted, but I felt like 16 going on 35.”

In this period of isolation, Thatcher turned to music. It began as a series of experiments in her mother’s basement. She downloaded Ableton on a whim and just started to see what she could do. She then started expanding her toolkit, adding midi synths and various plugins to her setup. Having grown up on the computer — her favourite activity outside of acting up until this point had been making little movies on the life-simulation game Sims — she took to the software easily. “I could figure stuff out pretty easy. I had that knack,” she says. “Playing instruments wasn’t the easiest thing for me. I could do stuff on piano, but it wasn’t like I was classically trained. So, figuring out how to mess everything up in Ableton was the most exciting thing for me.” Years later, by the time she went to finally record her debut project proper, she’d amassed hundreds of demo songs. Some she’d release on bandcamp, but never as any “official” project. In those late teen years, her only focus was on getting out and getting big.

At eighteen, she decided — conclusively — to move out. Her first stop was New York, where she went with the intention of continuing theater. There, her world expanded beyond measure. The scale of opportunity was heightened — she studied Meisner at the Maggie Flanigan Studio and booked her first big movie mere months after arriving — as were the cultural experiences she was able to rub shoulders with. Courtesy of a now-ex boyfriend, she was indoctrinated into the city’s live music scene. “We had very similar taste in music, and it was nice to meet somebody that dug a little deeper and was a bit more obscure,” she says of the relationship. “Pretty early on I found some really cool people. Everyone was just obsessed with music, and it was all I would talk about people. I had that back in Chicago, but people were moving to New York to make music,” she says. “I was just really inspired. It was a really cool point in my life.”

Many of the musical influences she now cites as touchstones for her own project — John Cale, Animal Collective, Avey Tear, Blonde Redhead — she first connected to in New York. Finding those bands, she began to understand how the “limits” of art and music could be stretched. She paid attention when artists ventured off the beaten path and dipped into atmospheric, rambling, improvisational territory.

It was at one of these shows that Thatcher also met one of her now closest friends and collaborators, DJ and producer Maral. “The reason why I put out music now is because she gave me that confidence,” Thatcher says of their relationship. Later, Maral put her in touch with Adam McDaniel, owner of Drop of Sun studios in Asheville. The trio first came together when Thatcher and Maral went in to record a Sparklehorse cover for fun. But the partnership quickly grew into more.

“It was like this match made in heaven,” Thatcher says. At the time, she had a month off from a movie she’d been shooting. She’d since left New York for L.A. — both for industry reasons and for her boyfriend, Austin Feinstein, who records as Slow Hollows and whose imprints appear frequently across her music — and Thatcher was feeling antsy. She was sitting on a massive archive of demos, and getting in touch with McDaniel finally gave her a reason to go into the studio.

“My first time in the studio was recording that Sparklehorse cover, and it was so much fucking fun,” she says. “At first it felt pretty humiliating, because I was like, ‘I’m wasting everybody’s time.’ I felt self-indulgent doing it to some extent. But, you’ve gotta rid yourself of that, and I quickly did.”

At Drop of Sun, the possibilities for her music expanded exponentially. She brought in a host of musicians — horns, flutes, strings — and could finally build arrangements so textured and satisfying that they felt, to her, like film scores. “It was possibly the most satisfying thing artistically for me. I had never felt that with doing any movies before,” she says.

In the studio, she wasn’t just looking to build a record but a world. “Growing up with this Icelandic band múm was really informative. They have such specific world building, and it’s so atmospheric,” Thatcher says. The final product of those sessions, Pivot & Scrape, is a testament to that singular vision. Centering Thatcher’s wispy, soulful, alto vocals and sweeping, dreamlike soundscapes, the record almost feels like the second coming of Kate Bush. Its roots are clearly anchored in the traditions of those 90s and 00s alternative groups she loves, and yet it still manages to feel fresh and new.

Building the world of this record was, then, perhaps Thatcher’s ultimate character study. Tackling often-jarring themes — spiritual guilt and redemption, a nod to her Mormon upbringing, lucid dreaming — the record feels dark but never too heavy-handed. Its visuals pull from French new wave, from goth, and from the Victorian era. She allowed, she tells me, her influences and impulses to be set free. “With this record, I felt like the conductor in this insane little experiment,” she explains. “It felt really exhilarating and like I finally had control.”