The screen flickers for a second as Sophie adjusts her headphones. For a moment the image freezes, then settles. It’s the small choreography of a video call: two strangers negotiating a shared digital room. She looks at the camera, smiling, and asks whether there will be any photos. She isn’t wearing makeup. There won’t be any. The reassurance lands easily, and the conversation starts.
panicbaby didn’t emerge from a rehearsal space or a traditional label pipeline. She arrived through fragments: TikTok snippets, Tumblr-era aesthetics, secret lyrics stored in phone notes for years before they found their melody. Her breakout single ‘Claw Marks’ spread in the way songs do now: quickly, horizontally, carried by thousands. She remembers finishing it at a friend’s house and putting it into the world without ceremony, then watching people respond to it in real time. “Seeing that people connect with something I did… I didn’t have an artist project before, so I didn’t know what that felt like at all,” she says.
But before panicbaby, Sophie was already writing. It just wasn’t for herself. For several years she worked as a songwriter for other artists, primarily in the dance and DJ world. She talks about that work with a kind of practical fondness. It taught her how songs are assembled - the craft of songwriting. Writing for oneself is different. The lyrics feel, somehow, closer.
Claw Marks
panicbaby’s debut single
“I was just a writer for other people… which I love doing, but it’s obviously very different and not coming from such a personal, introspective place.”
The pieces of panicbaby arrived gradually: an Omnichord she had wanted for years, old habits of making movie collages on Tumblr, the visual instinct shaped by hours spent sampling images and rearranging them into emotional sequences. As she talks about Tumblr, there’s a shared recognition of that particular internet archive owned by a generation raised on curated feelings and images that functioned as shorthand for moods that were difficult to name. For Sophie, that aesthetic isn’t decoration. It all operates in the same register: “Tumblr is quite similar to making music in the sense that you sample stuff and repurpose it and make it your own.”
At one point a friend walks through the background of the call behind me, briefly entering the frame. I warn Sophie not to be shocked. She laughs and waves it off, and the interruption folds easily back into the conversation. The moment is small and domestic; the kind of everyday overlap that usually gets edited out of public-facing spaces. But it brushes up against something Sophie keeps circling as we talk: what it feels like to move through environments that quietly ask for composure, especially as a young woman whose emotional range doesn’t always fit inside those expectations.
“I feel like being a woman… I have so many emotions and feelings all the time. And that makes you feel like you’re the one that’s insane because everybody else seems to not maybe have so many emotions.”
She talks about the subtle regulation built into social spaces and the way behavior that strays too far from the norm is quickly labeled excessive or embarrassing. Her attraction to stories about women who slowly unravel comes from that tension: narratives where restraint gives way to something messier and more honest. When we circle around the word 'cringe', the shorthand threat hanging over much online expression, Sophie shrugs. “Sometimes you just have to think fuck everyone and radically accept yourself.”
She says it casually, almost cheerfully. Posting music online becomes a way of testing whether a feeling survives in contact with other people. The response is immediate: either it resonates or it doesn’t. There’s a freedom in that exchange, in bypassing the usual intermediaries. Then the conversation slides into love the way conversations often do — sideways, through a joke about romanticizing life. Sophie wonders out loud whether believing in love has become unfashionable, whether relationships have been flattened by practicality.
“Who’s even believing in love? … Love is such a rational decision these days.”
She isn’t arguing against reason. She’s describing a hunger for something less measured. The alternative, she suggests, feels thin. She asks: “If you don’t care about something, what do you do then?” And that question runs through her songs as they move between embarrassment and desire without trying to settle the tension. Her track “soft prn,” she says, is honest about intimacy in a way that holds both attraction and discomfort in the same frame.
soft prn
When we talk about live shows, fear enters the conversation without drama. Performing is frightening in a straightforward way: standing in front of a lot of strangers as private words leave her mouth. Sophie treats that fear as part of the work rather than a signal to stop.
“You don’t have to be fearless. Doing things afraid is just as brave.”
That attitude now propels the project forward. Panicbaby is taking the songs on a European tour, moving from city to city. At the end of this month, she’ll bring them to Amsterdam. Toward the end of the call, she asks if I’ll be at the show. We say goodbye and the screen flickers once more before going dark. The afternoon resumes on both sides.
Panicbaby performs at Paradiso Amsterdam on February 24. More info and tickets via our website.
Written by Senna van Ruiten