“Am I useless if they call me?” Lowly’s Soffie Viemose sings on “Brave,” the first song on the Danish group’s new album “Softy.” “How can I protect my family?” “What good is my singing to a man, trans, daughter or son?” she wonders, over swirls of synthesizers.
In “Liminal Space,” they ask, “How do we make the garden safer?”
It’s a dangerous world, and the band, comprised of new parents, are full of questions. Call “Softy” a soundtrack of self-doubt.
“It has shaped the album with some kind of sensibility,” says Viemose, one the band’s two lead vocalists. “Towards our children, how do we act like we know what we’re doing? The responsibility that you have when you have kids to both take care of yourself and also take care of them, and then also trying to be in this world that is kind of full of things that you can’t really defend. You sort of have to be the shield in a way when you have children, and at the same time you should also be vulnerable in front of them.”
The ethical conundrums do not come with conclusions: “The lyrics are not certain of anything,” she continues. “It’s something that I guess I’ve sort of become more OK with. They don’t come with some kind of statement.”
“Softy,” out Oct. 30, is Lowly’s fourth LP for Bella Union, the esteemed UK indie label run by Simon Raymonde, of Cocteau Twins renown, and the first one that Viemose, Nanna Schannong (vocals), Kasper Staub (synthesizer), Thomas Lund (bass) and Steffen Lundtoft produced themselves. Working and living together at summer houses in Denmark brought an immediacy to the process compared to releases like 2022’s “Keep Up the Good Work.”
“I think the last album, we love it, but we called it like a layering cake, where you record a lot on top of each other, and we weren’t as much in the studio together as we could have been,” Viemose says. “And we had Anders [Boll] our producer, who was sort of the anchor of the record, and then we sort of shifted between like visiting him, but we weren’t really so much together in the studio with him.
“[For Softy], I think we just had a feeling of we really wanted to be together for these songs and maybe also kind of accept the songs for what they were, not having this FOMO feeling sometimes, or could we make the song even greater if we put on strings or did like a big, big production on this? We could just see that the songs were all right as they were. Also maybe because we had played them so much together, that was also a value in itself.”
In January of 2026, Lowly received a cosign from Brian Eno, a longtime champion of the atmospheric art pop outfit, when he chose their song “baglaens” to close his “Records The Changed My Life” presentation at the Serpentine Galleries in London.
“We were very, very excited about it, and also it’s just a very surreal kind of acknowledgement to get from this person that we are looking so much up to, and he’s such a fantastic person,” Viemose says. “It’s just very absurd. And we haven’t met him. We are sort of trying to get in contact with him via Simon, and maybe it’ll happen someday. It’s just fantastic, but also kind of ungraspable in a way.”
The band members came from different musical places when they met at university, but there were some touchstones.
“Radiohead, and then sort of Beach House and the Flaming Lips,” the vocalist says. “A lot of them were also on the Bella Union roster, so we’re also looking at them and therefore also contacting them a lot.”
Asked how Lowly’s sound has changed over the course of about a decade since its inception, she surmises, “I think we started out in like a Tame Impala dream wave, Cocteau Twins type of sound, really like the sort of reverb sound, and maybe we’ve sort of gone to a more clear, dry place, more to-the-bone-type of production also.”
Scheduled concerts, for now, are limited to a run of dates in their native Denmark in January.
“I think it’s always incredible just to play in the US. We played KEXP,” Viemose says, remembering a session at the influential Seattle indie radio station. “That was amazing and also really extremely nerve wracking. My mouth was so dry. Going on tour in the US, we got our visas approved the day before we had to leave, and I was in the embassy to pick them up, but that was really incredible.
“Also going to festivals in the UK where you sort live as a band and get to talk to your friends every day. It’s really nice to be on tour. And then of course we played in Denmark, some really big venues.
“It is also incredible to actually meet or see that you have listeners. You sort of forget that sometimes when we have these periods of downtime where we either make a record or are about to release a record, and that is quite a long sort of free period. In that time, you’re sort of uncertain if the audience is still there, so that when you go on tour, it’s really fantastic to see that people are listening and still caring about your music.”
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