Q&A: Soft Loft Talk Songwriting Sessions, Life Advice and Phoebe Bridgers
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY ANNA CUCIUREAN-ZAPAN ☆
Flavio Leone
LET SOFT LOFT BE YOUR MUSIC THERAPIST — The world of indie music is oversaturated. New bands come as fast as they go. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up, sometimes it’s too much. Soft Loft, on the other hand, is just getting started.
Reigning from the beautiful land of Switzerland, these five friends (Jorina Stamm, Lukas Kuprecht, Marius Meier, Sarina Schmid and Simon Boss) have been on the move, self-releasing their first EP In Case You Get Lonely in 2023 and then debut album The Party and the Mess in 2024, and most recently their EP Modern Roses in 2025. They’ve traveled across Europe for headline shows, opening sets and festival slots and all the like. Today, they’re coming out with their second album, Throw The Dice.
When one thinks of throwing dice, one’s mind might drift towards Monopoly, craps, Jacks, on and on. The point is these are games of chance, and what is life if not a game of chance? With this body of work, Soft Loft explores the themes of adulthood and moving through life without truly having a grasp of what’s going on. They eloquently paint the picture of your mid 20s in a much more beautiful, less anxiety-attack-ridden way then what I write down in my diary.
Soft Loft themselves describe their music as “indie-something-something.” My first thought when listening to their album is that it felt as if I stumbled upon Big Thief before they went mainstream. They have the emotional prowess to move me like The Head and The Heart, and the instrumentation like Sufjan Stevens. Featuring layered echoing vocals, strong acoustic guitar and light drums, Throw The Dice has the ability to cement itself as a core listening piece for today’s modern indie music.
Luna caught up with vocalist Jorina Stamm as she cozied up in her apartment with a cup of tea.
LUNA: How do all of you in Soft Loft know each other, and how did you come to be?
JORINA STAMM: Some of us actually grew up together in the same hometown. We've been doing music for around 10 years, but we started Soft Loft four years ago, and it was very coincidental. We started as two, and then we were three, and then someone knew the bassist, and we all got together very very randomly and now we're here.
LUNA: For the album, I saw that you guys worked with engineer Sean Cook and producer Craig Silvey, who have collaborated in the past with such amazing fellow artists like Florence and the Machine, Arcade Fire, etc. How did it feel working with someone that's worked with artists like that?
STAMM: It's very cool for us to be a band from Switzerland and to reach out to people that we feel like are out of reach. Then you write them, “Would you want to record an album with us, or would you want to mix the album?” and they're all very nice, and it all works out in the end so that was very exciting for us. We worked in the studio with Sean, and he's a very cool guy to record with because he's done a lot of amazing recordings. Craig mixed the album, and we never met him, but it was very cool to work with him as well because it felt like he really gets the music and he really gets what we wanted to sound like.
LUNA: In a couple other interviews you say writing as a band is very fluid for you all. When you're in the studio or just in general thinking about your music, how do you bounce ideas off one another? Is there ever any tension?
STAMM: I wouldn't call it tension, but we do not always want the same thing for a song. We tend to swap the song around. We’ll start working on a song with just two of us and then we give it off to the other three, and we give it back and forth to each other like a ping pong game. If it's very important to me to have something particular in a song, the others are like, “Okay we’ll include it, I'm not like agreeing with you, but I guess it's important for you.” So it all works out when we talk about it to each other. We talk a lot with a couple of friends that are solo artists, and we are very lucky to have these five people because we're always motivating each other and getting each other out of writer's block.
LUNA: On your socials, it’s interesting seeing you guys switch back and forth from doing videos or captioning in German and then also videos in English. How has it been marketing yourselves in the European market versus trying to come into the American one?
STAMM: We always wrote all our songs in English because we felt we wanted to connect with everyone. But we recently did these very big support shows for a big German band [AnnenMayKantereit], and a lot of those fans started connecting with us, and that's why we started doing some posts in German because it felt natural. With this album campaign we just started to try and reach people in the U.S. We would love to play a U.S. tour, but it's just very far away and very expensive, but hopefully someday we will.
LUNA: Have you all traveled anywhere recently that was new or exciting?
STAMM: We're going to be in Prague for the first time for our fall tour, which is crazy for us because we've never toured there. We're very excited to go see new places all the time.
LUNA: When I was listening to all your past music and looking at your visuals and stuff, I almost got a Wes Anderson kind of vibe from you guys. Is there any music or even art right now that you feel specifically influenced this album?
STAMM: For me, it's always been people like Phoebe Bridgers, Big Thief, Lizzie McAlpine, all these indie pop folk artists are very inspiring to me. I was listening to Phoebe’s album on a car drive home from one of our big support shows, and I was driving with the windows down, crying, bawling my eyes out. I love it.
LUNA: Your album is called Throw the Dice, and you talk a little bit about in other interviews that it's all about taking risks but also thinking about the past. You guys truly write about these themes so eloquently. What has been some helpful advice or just something that you've experienced recently that you feel has helped you move through this stage of your life?
STAMM: A friend of mine told me that her aunt, who is 70, said, "Well, I am still struggling with everything, and I still feel like I'm not a grown up.” All these questions that we're asking ourselves at 25 or 30, they're gonna pop up when you're 70 or 40 or 50, and I find it a relief that we all don't know what we’re doing. Everyone feels kind of lost sometimes, and everyone is trying to find answers to questions that maybe don’t have an answer.
LUNA: Do you have any regrets in your life or is there anything you wish you “threw the dice” on?
STAMM: I wouldn't say I have a lot of regrets, but I kind of held back a lot of stuff in my life for a long time, and I tried to build this wall so nothing could get to me. I guess feeling and letting people in is something that I should have done earlier in my life, and I kind of regret that a bit. But also, you take so much with every experience in your life and you learn from it, so I would say I half regret it.
LUNA: I totally agree, and it's so lovely having more people in their 20s write this kind of music. I feel like it's something that's almost kind of missing from music because we have music about relationships and stuff like that, but I think your relationship with yourself is also so important.
STAMM: That's exactly what I'm hoping people take from this album. I hope these songs accompany them and help them know that they’re not alone with all their feelings. We hosted a pre-listening party last week with some fans and friends and family, and it was just so wholesome that everyone was listening to it, and was like, "Oh, I love this music, and your music kind of helps me get through things.” That's everything for us that our music is a safe space for people.
LUNA: With tour life, what experiences do you all find more interesting or fun? Is it going to festivals? Is it opening for people, or is it these headlining shows?
STAMM: I think we always switch favorites for what we can't have at the moment. So after this summer and playing all these festivals, which was very very fun, we're just very excited for our headline shows. It's cool to play for those big crowds and have people getting to know you, but it's also very nice to have a smaller space and people that really know and listen to your music sing along. They’re all just a different vibe. We're very excited for the club indoor headline shows right now, but I guess after we've done these, we're gonna be very excited for festivals again.
LUNA: What are you excited for Soft Loft and what do you hope is in store for your future?
STAMM: We're very excited to release the album, to release new music, to go tour, to get people to listen to our music, and hopefully to find a place in the music bubble, so that one day we can maybe live off [of] music and get to do this full time. That would be a dream for us.
