Song #22: "We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow" by Soko

 

Soko — “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow”

Rating: 63/100

The card

Chart performance

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #9
Yearly rank: #45
Weeks charted: 1
Weeks Top 20: 1
Weeks Top 10: 1
Weeks at peak: 1

Chart note: “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow” debuted at #9 on March 29, 2014, then disappeared from the Hot 100 entirely the following week. At the time, it was the highest-debuting song in Hot 100 history to spend exactly one week on the chart. J. Cole’s “7 Minute Drill” eventually surpassed that record in 2024.

Soko at this point

Charting record: 1st of 1
Top-20 hit: 1st of 1
Top-10 hit: 1st of 1
#1 pop hit: None
Previous Top-20 hit: None
Next Top-20 hit: None

Retrospective standing

GOAT overall: #16,231
Among Soko songs: 1st of 1
Among Soko Top-20 hits: 1st of 1
GOAT points: 23,460
Hot 100 portion of chart run: #9 peak, 1 week

Record details

Entered chart: March 29, 2014
Released: February 20, 2012
Recorded: 2011
Single: “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow”
Album: I Thought I Was an Alien
Songwriter: Stéphanie Sokolinski (Soko)
Producer: Soko, with additional production by Fritz Michaud
Lead vocal: Soko
Running time: 2:41
Label: Babycat Records / Because Music
Catalog number: Not reliably established for a U.S. physical single
Recording to use: Soko’s original 2011/2012 studio recording from I Thought I Was an Alien

Listen / watch / read

🎧 Original recording: Soko — “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow”
📺 Official/original music video: Soko — “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow,” directed by Soko and filmed in Los Angeles in April 2012
📺 Viral film: First Kiss, directed by Tatia Pilieva for Wren, 2014
📝 Lyrics: Apple Music

Versions & title history

Original or cover: Original; written by Soko.
Important later charting versions: None identified.
Same-title unrelated chart hits: None identified.

Streaming note

The 2012 studio recording is the chart recording. Its 2014 Hot 100 appearance resulted overwhelmingly from YouTube streams generated when the existing recording was used as the soundtrack to the viral short film First Kiss.

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I remember this song.

That is not the same thing as saying I remember hearing it.

In March 2014, I was following the Billboard Hot 100 when a name I had never seen suddenly appeared at #9: Soko, “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow.” There are plenty of ways for an unfamiliar artist to creep onto the chart. They can enter at #94, climb for a while, pick up radio play, and eventually become somebody you know.

That is not what happened here.

Soko simply materialized at #9.

I looked up why. The answer involved a viral YouTube video of strangers kissing. Then, one week later, Soko disappeared from the Hot 100 completely.

That was weird enough that I put the song in my favorites, essentially as a bookmark. I have kept it there for twelve years.

Only now have I really stopped to consider the song on its own terms.

The next town over from nowhere

Soko did not actually come from nowhere. She came from approximately the next town over.

Soko is Stéphanie Sokolinski, a French singer-songwriter and actress from Bordeaux. She had been working professionally for years before America briefly decided she had one of its ten biggest songs.

Her first musical breakthrough had already been somewhat accidental. “I’ll Kill Her” spread through MySpace in 2007, became a hit in Denmark and attracted attention elsewhere in Europe and Australia. She developed a small international indie following while building a legitimate acting career in France, including a César nomination for Most Promising Actress for À l'origine.

She was not, however, a French pop superstar waiting for America to catch up.

That distinction matters because French performers have historically had an extraordinarily difficult time translating their success to the American singles chart. Édith Piaf, probably the first person many Americans would name if asked for a French singer, peaked at only #88 with “Milord.” Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s very French “Je t’aime… moi non plus” made it only to #58. Vanessa Paradis had a massive European hit with “Joe le taxi” and never reached the Hot 100 with it.

There have been exceptions. Paul Mauriat took the instrumental “Love Is Blue” to #1 in 1968, and later French electronic acts and producers such as Daft Punk, David Guetta and DJ Snake found much more success in America. But that is a different route into the American market.

Soko was not producing a Rihanna record or hiding her Frenchness behind an instrumental.

She was singing her own strange little indie song.

And somehow she reached #9.

The absurdity is even clearer when you look homeward: even after First Kiss exploded, “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow” peaked at only #61 in France.

For one week, America liked Soko considerably more than France did.

We might actually be dead by tomorrow

The title sounds like something an indie songwriter might choose because mortality makes an interesting theme.

For Soko, it wasn't theoretical.

Her father died suddenly from an aneurysm when she was five years old. She has talked about having nightmares about people dying as a child and, after her father's death, developing the irrational childhood fear that somehow her nightmares had caused it.

The experience left her with an unusually acute awareness that people can simply disappear.

That is the key to “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow.”

This isn't really a song arguing that life is pointless because we're all going to die. It makes almost the opposite argument. Death is inevitable, so stop withholding yourself from the people you love. Stop using busyness or fear as an excuse to avoid vulnerability. Love while you have the opportunity.

The music reflects that tension.

Soko's vocal is extremely breathy, almost whispered. In 2026, after years of bedroom pop and singers such as Billie Eilish making intimate close-miked vocals commonplace in mainstream pop, it doesn't sound particularly radical. In 2012—or especially sitting at #9 alongside the much louder records of 2014—it was considerably stranger.

Underneath her are guitar and soft strings. Soko recorded the guitar and vocal together in two takes and then brought in her friend Indiana to play violin. She wanted harmonics that reminded her of what she described as crying whales: sad, beautiful and comforting at the same time.

That is a pretty good description of the record.

The lyrics are surprisingly imperative. Soko sounds fragile, but what she is saying is not passive. Love now. Stop waiting. Stop protecting yourself. Eventually the song ends with her repeating the reminder that soon enough, we'll die.

It is dark.

It is also urgent.

Twenty strangers

Two years later, filmmaker Tatia Pilieva had an idea.

Put twenty people together in pairs. Have them meet for the first time. Then tell them to kiss.

Pilieva made the three-and-a-half-minute black-and-white short First Kiss for Wren, a small Los Angeles clothing company run by her friend Melissa Coker. The participants wore Wren clothing, so technically this was advertising. But it doesn't play much like an advertisement.

It plays like a tiny social experiment.

The kissing is almost secondary. The interesting part is watching people realize that they're going to have to kiss.

They laugh. They stare at each other. They look away. They don't know where to put their hands. Some talk because they clearly have no idea what else to do. Some seem ready to get on with it. Others look as though they would happily spend the rest of the afternoon negotiating.

It is surprisingly watchable.

Soko herself is one of the participants, paired with actress Marianna Palka. Soko had asked if she could kiss a woman rather than a man.

Pilieva also needed music.

Soko was friends with Coker and had allowed them to use her music. Pilieva chose “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow.”

She could hardly have chosen better.

The film wasn't constructed around the song, and the song certainly wasn't written for the film. But the ideas line up almost perfectly. Here are people visibly terrified of making themselves vulnerable to another human being, while somewhere underneath them Soko is essentially saying: Stop hesitating. You don't have forever.

And “underneath” is the important word.

The song does not dominate First Kiss. Most of the time, the talking, laughing, movement and actual sounds of people kissing sit over Soko in the mix. At times it is difficult to make out what she is singing at all. There is a quieter moment when “let's love loud” becomes clearly audible, and the lyric seems almost perfectly synchronized with what we're watching.

But mostly the song stays out of the way.

Soko's recording succeeds partly because it is easy not to notice.

Eleven and a half million people “listen” to Soko

First Kiss went absolutely berserk.

It passed 10 million YouTube views in roughly two days. Within days it was approaching 40 million. Eventually it would accumulate tens of millions more.

That mattered because Billboard had only begun incorporating U.S. YouTube viewing into the Hot 100 methodology in February 2013. Suddenly, watching a viral video could help make its soundtrack a hit record.

During the tracking week ending March 16, 2014, “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow” accumulated 11.5 million U.S. streams.

Ninety-nine percent came from YouTube.

Streaming accounted for 96 percent of the song's Hot 100 points.

Actual downloads?

About 10,000.

The result was one of the strangest #9 records Billboard has ever published.

Contemporary chart writer Paul Grein responded with a headline that might as well have been written specifically for me:

“Who Is Soko And Why Is She #9?”

He also reached essentially the same conclusion I did watching First Kiss today: most viewers probably weren't paying particularly close attention to the song.

That doesn't make the chart position illegitimate.

Millions of Americans really were being exposed to Soko's recording. If Billboard was attempting to measure what music Americans were consuming, leaving out those millions of encounters would have produced a less accurate chart, not a more accurate one.

But First Kiss exposed an interesting distinction between hearing a song and adopting a song.

Millions heard Soko.

Relatively few appear to have decided that what they really needed afterward was more Soko.

#9 and gone

The following week, “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow” wasn't #30.

It wasn't #70.

It wasn't #99.

It was gone.

Before Soko, the highest a song had debuted while spending exactly one week on the Hot 100 was #11, a record first set by the Jonas Brothers' “A Little Bit Longer” in 2008 and tied by One Direction's “Diana” in 2013.

Soko blew past them.

What makes Soko's disappearance especially strange is that First Kiss itself did not disappear. The video continued piling up views.

But after watching it today, I think I understand the disconnect better.

First Kiss is a very good viral video. It is interesting. It is human. It is funny in places. The discomfort is compelling.

But it isn't a film that particularly requires repeat viewings. Once or twice and you have basically gotten what it has to give you. The concept doesn't contain endless layers to unpack. You watch to see what happens when strangers are told to kiss. Then you've seen what happens.

That is almost an ideal recipe for an enormous viral spike: You have to see this.

It is not necessarily a recipe for: I have to see this again.

Meanwhile, the phenomenon rapidly became a template. Parodies and imitations appeared almost immediately. The Internet could keep talking about First Kiss without necessarily continuing to watch the original—and certainly without continuing to hear Soko's soundtrack.

The viral video remained viral.

The viral hit vanished.

And because Soko had essentially no radio or sales foundation underneath those streams, there was nothing to catch the song when the initial wave passed.

So what do you do with a #9 hit?

Apparently, if you're Soko, not much.

Major labels suddenly became interested in signing her. Soko later said she believed they were interested for the wrong reasons. She also understood exactly how unstable Internet fame could be: one day everybody knows you, and the next they have moved on.

More importantly, there wasn't much here that Soko could reproduce. A two-year-old song had been paired with exactly the right viral video at exactly the right moment.

This wasn't a formula.

So Soko returned to the career she had before Billboard briefly interrupted it.

Her next album, My Dreams Dictate My Reality, moved toward post-punk, goth and new wave rather than attempting to manufacture another “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow.” She continued acting. She later earned another César nomination for The Dancer. She kept making music.

Her career trajectory basically looks like this:

French actress and eccentric international indie musician.

French actress and eccentric international indie musician.

BILLBOARD HOT 100 TOP-TEN ARTIST.

French actress and eccentric international indie musician.

The Hot 100 wandered into Soko's career for a week.

Then it wandered back out.

63/100

This is a difficult song for me to separate from its story because the story is why I've remembered it for twelve years.

As a record, I like it.

I'm not naturally drawn to whisper-pop, and Soko's breathy delivery puts a ceiling on how much I'm likely to love it. But it works here. The song is soft and vulnerable without feeling calculated, and the mortality theme is unlike almost anything you'd expect from a pop song.

Knowing why Soko wrote it helps.

This kind of material could be awful if the singer didn't mean it. Soko very clearly does.

Sonically, it's good. The violin gives it a melancholy character without overwhelming it. The recording feels intimate and handmade, which fits both the subject and Soko herself.

But hearing it carefully didn't reveal some hidden masterpiece that I'd somehow overlooked for twelve years.

The story is more interesting than the song.

Fortunately, the song isn't bad.

63/100.

And I'm keeping it in my favorites.

At this point, removing it would almost be historically inaccurate.