Welcome to Uffie’s new album Sunshine Factory – an alternate reality that is only accessible to those yearning for escape. A nod to the ballroom scene, it is a place where you can be your most authentic self. Inside this trippy wonderland, you’ll meet Uffie, dancing amongst the lights of your hallucinations. Sunshine Factory is a wonderfully restless record. It’s a joyride through the club, hurtling into the forest, and crowd surfing into the arms of a lover… and yet it’s also the sound of waking up to a heap of champagne soaked jeans, the bass of your heart still throbbing along to last night’s melodies.
A decade after her first record, which included–debatably–the internet’s first viral hit, the electro smash “Pop The Glock,” Uffie “the French-American singer/rapper/DJ/fashion designer who took the internet by storm” (Brooklyn Vegan) is most definitely back. Raised between Florida and Hong Kong before moving to Paris with her British father, the now Los Angeles-based Uffie is undeniably a “child of the world;” unsurprisingly, the making of this record clocked up a few air miles as well. Birthing what would become the Sunshine Factory in Fonte da Telha, Portugal collaborating with Norwegian savant Lasse Lokøy, Uffie soon found a home for these songs back in California with Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi–who co-produced several of the tracks–and his Oakland-based label, Company Records. The resulting album is one of intricate production, sonic experimentation, and subtle poetic brilliance amongst a few Fleabag glances to the camera.
Amidst double entendres galore, her record exists in a curious space between punk and pop, which can be heard in the ska-meets-fashion week “dominoes.” Contrarily, “sophia” – which marked the advent of Uffie and Chaz’s creative partnership several years ago – poises Sunshine Factory as an otherworldly dance record one would hear in Berlin’s famous Berghain nightclub. She is the party girl who is at her most vulnerable in the chaotic “where does the party go?” where she reckons with facing who she truly is when she’s all alone. It’s in these dualities and juxtapositions that the joy of Uffie writhes.
The album also has a cameo or three, including the one and only Peaches. And after finding kinship and admiration in the genre-defying NNAMDÏ, she tapped him for the record’s sole feature on “month of mondays.” It is at this point in the record that the beloved je ne sais quoi that Uffie has always possessed really emerges. When the comedown begins and the insatiable few remain on the dancefloor, “a month of mondays” is the knowing nod to a stranger signaling the night’s shift in course. With Sunshine Factory, it’s a pop-up party wherever you can find some speakers. Cool.
