For Minnesota Music Month, The Current polled local music fans for April’s edition of The Scouting Report. A total of 245 people filled out this year’s Minnesota Music Month Scouting Report ballot, and 455 unique artists were chosen overall. The top 10 artists who received the most support include Sophie Hiroko.

Sophie Hiroko is still adjusting to her recent move to Minneapolis from Duluth, which continues to affect her dreams — as well as her music.

The 24-year-old singer-songwriter moved here in August, shortly after releasing her debut EP, to the core, in July. The eternal charms of the North Shore still have a lasting impact on her. In fact, she was sitting by Lake Superior during our phone conversation, the day after she opened for friends Third Date at their EP release party at the 331 Club.

“My dreams in Duluth are generally very intense, which is different in [Minneapolis], because I feel like I can almost hear and feel the chatter of all of the people,” she says. “It's a little bit less of a meditative space for me. The color, the vibrancy, the artistry, the music, the musicianship in the cities is just so much more intense as well as the general consciousness. It's been very inspiring in many ways.”

Hiroko self-produced her EP alongside Matt Castore, who also engineered and mixed the five-song project at Soft Cult Studio in Minneapolis. Castore initially reached out to Hiroko on Instagram, saying he wanted to record a song of hers for a Minnesota music compilation featuring unrecorded musicians. That session ended up producing “ashes,” a vulnerable, churning indie rock tune reminiscent of The Breeders and Belly, capturing a sound that Hiroko describes as “tender bubble grunge.”

“It went so well,” Hiroko says of that initial session. “Matt really helped me. I came down with my guitar, no other band members, but I still wanted a full band sound. On the spot, Matt wrote the drums, bass, and organ parts. We put that together just us two in the studio, and it was such an incredible experience. Clearly that song has been so powerful for me and for my career, and I'm so eternally grateful.” Hiroko released an official music video for “ashes” in August, which was directed by Henriette Jensen Blade.

Six months later, when it came time to record the four additional songs that fill out to the core, of course Hiroko wanted to link up with Castore again. So the duo returned to Soft Cult and recorded the other tracks, much in the same way they made “ashes.” “It was just us collaboratively creating this incredible project,” Hiroko recalls. “We’d just listen to our inspiration playlist that I would make, and then he just laid it all down very quickly and impressively and beautifully. He was so receptive and understood and heard my reference points.”

While those initial sessions represented a collaboration between Hiroko and Castore, when she moved to Minneapolis full-time, she quickly found a pair of like-minded musicians — drummer Skye Sutherland and bassist Kara Hageman — to fill out her band.

“All of us have backgrounds in punk music,” Hiroko says of her new bandmates. She met Hageman when she was engineering her sound at her show at the Hook and Ladder, while she met Sutherland at a S.L.O.G. show.

“Those were the first two people that I reached out to, and I'm so lucky and so grateful,” Hiroko says. “And now I have a girl band, which has been a dream of mine since I started, and it feels so true to how I'm writing. I feel it's the only way for me to actualize the feelings I'm going through, which I feel are so unique to girlhood in a sense.”

Hiroko and her band released their new single, “DIVORCE,” in January, along with another new track, “cashmere candles,” which both document significant life-altering events in her life, as well as “the indescribable growing pains Hiroko has experienced since leaving Duluth this past summer.”

“This single, ‘DIVORCE,’ is a very personal song to me, because it is detailing what actually happened, which is that I got a divorce at 23,” Hiroko reveals. “That was a part of my sacrifice of moving to the [Twin Cities]. I realized that I had to get a divorce to continue forward with my career. So it felt like a divorce from the life that I have known, also my literal relationship, and any idea I might have had on how my life was going to go. This has been a dream of mine, but it didn't quite seem like it could be actualized. Being a full-time artist is something that a creative person dreams about, but it takes so much to really come into fruition. So the song symbolizes the divorce from whatever life I could have lived if it weren't to revolve around music in the way that it does now.”

The new tracks were produced and engineered by Castore and recorded at Soft Cult again, with Hiroko thrilled to have her new band by her side while she captured these raw, emotional songs that burn with the intensity of Live Through This-era Hole. “It was my first time experiencing recording with a full band, and we just laid the tracks down,” Hiroko says, while also praising Castore’s contributions. “The scream at the end of ‘DIVORCE,’ he helped me engineer it to sound like a telephone. Matt had a little bit less to do with the actual sound creating, but he was an important part of the team. It felt cohesive and beautiful.”

Hiroko is well aware of the rich music history in Minnesota, and is excited to carve out her own unique space in the scene. “Thinking about Bob Dylan also coming from Duluth, I can just see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. That sound that he created, that's northern Minnesota,” Hiroko says. “And then when I think about Prince coming from the Twin Cities, the bright purple vibrancy, edgy, experimental, sexy, that seems like Minneapolis to me. We're all rooted into the place where we are from, where we are. Every time we step on the ground, deep roots extend into the soil, so how can that not bleed through into what we're creating.”

Hiroko still has two days of recording time awaiting her at the legendary Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, which she was awarded when she became the 2025 recipient of Trampled By Turtles’ Palomino Grant. She has some new songs she is working on, and can’t wait to record in the same studio as icons like Nirvana and PJ Harvey. No matter what direction she takes her sound in the future, it will have a grit and an edginess to it that draws from the places she has called home.

“Right now I'm making grunge music that's less bubbly,” Hiroko says, while contemplating her “tender bubble grunge” label. “I'm definitely feeling like the port town of Duluth, gray, hazy fog, heavy waves crashing into the shore. It doesn't feel like a summertime bubble. It's still tender, but I think the bubble might have popped. I'm trying to get a little weirder, if possible.”

Sophie Hiroko will perform with Ber and Bunny Blood at The Local Show Live Recording at the UBS Forum at Minnesota Public Radio on Friday, April 17. More details here

Related: Minnesota Music Month Scouting Report 2026: The top 10 new local artists