Sofftness - Sofft Power Sofftness

Four friends with a shared love of post punk (and a varied list of past band haunts including No Peeling, Slumb Party, White Finger & Headcut), Sofftness made a shift in direction instead of resurrecting what had already burned through. New band: new start. No chasing relevance, no performing correctness, no pretending to be the kind of punk band someone else might approve of.

Their debut album Sofft Power was recorded over three impatient days with Jonah Falco (Fucked Up), who caught the band in that raw, twitching state between frustration and clarity. The title twists the language of diplomacy — ‘soft power’ as culture, attraction, persuasion, shared values — but here those tools have curdled. Culture becomes content, attraction becomes getting rated, persuasion becomes advertising, shared values become something you perform for an audience that isn’t really watching. Lyrically, Sofft Power also pushes back against the wider music industry obsession with metrics and marketability — an ecosystem that flattens risk, rewards predictability, and treats artists less like creators and more like endlessly replenishable inventory.

Sofftness are refusing to play along.

Sofft Power is what remains when persuasion has failed — not hard power, not revolution, just endurance. These songs found their way through the cracks of work, friendship, ambition, and everyday life in a world that keeps on insisting something meaningful is happening. There’s no grand rebellion, just the slow realisation that nothing has changed. Defeated, disillusioned, sick of the charade — not because we expect anything to shift, but because we still believe in the connection.

Somewhere in all of this — the cracked edges of British punk, the motorik throb of Krautrock, the Australian post punk worshipping — something new started to breathe. Something Sofft. It’s punk without the performance of punk. It’s the refusal to pretend.