The third album for Vienna-based songwriter Sofie Royer is called Young-Girl Forever. Royer drew the name from an essay, Preliminary Materials for the Theory of a Young-Girl, originally published in 1999 in the French anarchist journal Tiqqun.

Royer saw the quarter-century-old text as being impossibly prescient in its examination of image-making amidst the structures of empire, evoking not merely the musician's contemporary lot but the modern performance of living.

So, she applied it to her third record; seeing it as a totem for themes of 'craving eternal youth' and 'consumerism under modernity' which she explores across a set of more disco-inflected songs.

In conversation with Anthony Carew on The International Pop Underground, Royer talks about her life in music, from her childhood as a violin prodigy to the musician's current workplace requirements of navigating algorithmic media.

Feature image: Jasmin Baumgartner