Sofia Bolt is the French-born musician, songwriter, and producer, Amelie Rousseaux. Her nostalgic debut album, Waves, released in 2019, was praised by Iggy Pop, Pitchfork, and The Guardian. Since then she has collaborated regularly with songwriting legend Van Dyke Parks. The acclaimed soundtrack to Hedi Slimane’s CELINE W2020 collection was her creation as well. And most recently she can be heard singing in Cate Blanchett’s film production Fingernails. Bolt has toured with Interpol, Sharon van Etten, Stella Donnelly, and Rodrigo Amarante. 

Bolt’s follow-up EP Soft Like a Peach from 2022, is a collage of pop melodies both forever young and yet wise beyond their years. They are songs she wrote about finding ways to forgive and accept herself while living between two continents. The lead single “Secret Memories” was voted top 10 songs of 2022 by TIME Magazine. 

Recorded in Los Angeles at Tropico Beauty Studios, Bolt’s second and forthcoming LP Vendredi Minuit, was co-produced with longtime collaborator Oliver Hill (Dirty Projectors, Kevin Morby, Vagabon).

Dreamy, pensive, and visceral, Vendredi Minuit (French for Friday Midnight) delves into Bolt’s relationship with time, both lyrically and musically. Her shimmery, sparsely arranged songs feel like reflections on a personal but also collective past—referencing decades that have shaped her as a musician and a human, whether she lived through them or not. We get excerpts of Baudelaire; we brush with Mahler. Bolt celebrates her French grandmother in “Love is an Attitude.” “Milk,” with its wandering Velvet Underground-esque guitars, was inspired by a VHS of Titanic. 

The songs on Vendredi Minuit are examinations of experience, of pleasure and pain, of love gained and love lost. “Bus Song” featuring Stella Donnelly—an ethereal cruiser inspired by riding the bus in Los Angeles—alternates between emotional tension and release. In the verse you can picture the narrator staring out the window, maybe taking in too much at once (note the urgent backup vocals pulsing over the minor chords), and then almost suddenly, as if a conscious choice, the chorus jostles us into the major chord as if to say—maybe just enjoy the ride, let it go . . . maybe just embrace the uncertainty: “On a hot drive / Maybe I’ll meet you / Caught across time.”

While Bolt weaves bits of French pop, 60s psych, and 90s trip hop through Vendredi Minuit’s streets and hallways, her classic melodic structures and spirited grooves keep us locked (dare we say ‘Bolt’-ed?) into a deliberate meditation on the present. Enter Sofia Bolt’s universe and a timeless reverie one may find. Vendredi Minuit is out now via Born Losers Records.