Soko (singer)

Stéphanie Alexandra Mina Sokolinski (born 26 October 1985), known professionally as Soko (stylized as SoKo), is a French singer and actress. She released her debut single "I'll Kill Her" in 2007. It achieved airplay success in several European countries as well as Australia, peaking at number three on the Danish music charts, and was included on her debut EP Not Sokute (2007). Her debut studio album I Thought I Was an Alien was released in 2012 and contains the single "We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow", which achieved ninth place on the Billboard Hot 100. Ensuing years saw the releases of her second and third studio albums My Dreams Dictate My Reality (2015) and Feel Feelings (2020).

As an actress, Soko began appearing in a number of French productions in the early 2000s and earned a César Award for Most Promising Actress nomination for her role in the film In the Beginning (2009). She won the Courage in Acting Award at the Women Film Critics Circle Awards and the Best Actress award at the Mar del Plata Film Festival for her role as Augustine in the film Augustine (2012). She later appeared in the short film First Kiss (2014), which featured "We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow" and contributed to the song's chart success. Her role as Loie Fuller in The Dancer (2016) earned her Best Actress nominations at the César and Lumière Awards.

Stéphanie Alexandra Mina Sokolinski was born on 26 October 1985 in Bordeaux, France to a Russian-Polish father and a French-Italian mother. She has Jewish ancestry and said that "half of my family died in concentration camps" during the Holocaust. She was raised Catholic "because they all denied their religion and what not", but she has stated that she feels "Jewish trauma". She has five siblings. Her father died of an aneurysm when she was five years old. The incident had a profound impact on her, influencing her to become a vegetarian and later a vegan. This was followed by the deaths of all her grandparents and her godfather within the span of four years. She says that, as a result, she became "obsessed with death" and developed abandonment issues that were exacerbated by the fact that her single mother "wasn't emotionally available". She has used the nickname Soko for as long as she can remember. She began taking piano lessons at the age of five but described herself as a "very bad student" and stopped when she was 11. She left Bordeaux for Paris at the age of 16 to become an actress and began writing songs while taking acting classes at Cours Eva Saint-Paul; she says she "picked up songwriting" when she was 20 and taught herself how to play guitar, bass, and drums shortly afterwards.

In 2007, Soko achieved a hit single in Denmark with a personal anecdotal song, "I'll Kill Her", after the radio program The Black Boy Scouts began to promote it. The song reached number one on the chart of the Danish version of the iTunes Store and was the number one song in rotation on radio. The song also became a hit in Australia, being played on high rotation on Triple J radio; it later placed number nine in the Triple J Hottest 100 2007 music poll. The song was also popular in Belgium being played by Studio Brussel, Radio 1 and Pure FM, and in the Netherlands, being picked up by 3FM radio station. In October 2007 her music was featured in Stella McCartney's fashion show in Paris. She toured in the UK in late 2007 supporting M.I.A. on the KALA Tour. Since early 2008 she has also been played in Germany by 1LIVE, first only at night in 1Live Plan B but later, due to high demand, throughout the whole day.

Sokolinski has self-released one EP Not Sokute, and collaborated with The Go! Team and Cornershop, the latter on a song called "Something Makes You Feel Like". She has her own record label called Babycat Records and is signed to Because Music in France.

Sokolinski has had sold-out concerts in Scandinavia, Britain, and Australia. She performed at the Falls Festival at the end of 2008, the Southbound Festival and the Sunset Sounds Festival at the start of 2009. She has performed in the Los Angeles venues Fonda Theatre, Troubadour, Bootleg Theatre, Spaceland, and Echoplex, and has played in support of Pete Doherty, Babyshambles, Kate Nash, Nouvelle Vague, Daniel Johnston, Foster the People, and Johnny Borrell. In San Francisco, she performed at Bottom of the Hill on 15 June 2012. As a live performer, the singer acts unpredictably and never uses a set list; her backing band consists mostly of different friend-musicians at each show. She sometimes plays up to 3 hours by herself, in intimate and quiet venues.

On 19 January 2009 Sokolinski stated on her Myspace page that she was quitting music and was 'dead', writing that she was scared of the music industry and wanted to return to acting. Despite having recorded a double album in Seattle, she was not willing to release it. In August of the same year, she declared that she was 'reborn' and writing songs such as "I'm So Ready to Be a Good Man" where she writes:

"in my battle with the demons I just had to die coz they're way too evil and I couldn't fight"