Experimental pop, deconstructed club, hyperpop or bubblegum bass—whatever you want to label SOPHIE’s music as her essence lies in her elusiveness.
Breaking new ground from the moment she burst onto the music scene with her first official single ‘BIPP’. The Scottish producer and DJ gained a cult following by the time she released her 2015 compilation project PRODUCT and critical acclaim surrounding her Grammy-nominated 2019 debut album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. Having not only produced smash hits for artists ranging from Vince Staples (‘Yeah Right’) to Madonna (‘Bitch I’m Madonna’) and Charli xcx (‘Vroom Vroom’) alongside her own music; SOPHIE’s pioneering sound has only grown in influence since her tragic death in 2021. As such, her second studio album the self-titled SOPHIE was highly anticipated from it first being teased on her Instagram account (now run by her brother, Benny Long) in late June. Reportedly near completion at the time of her death, it was finally released on the 25th of September after receiving its finishing touches from Long, who himself is a producer and DJ, as well as a cast of SOPHIE’s “most cherished collaborators”.
Standing at a 67-minute runtime with 16 tracks total, SOPHIE is a deeply layered album. The first few tracks are dark and eerie—slower, longer, and less danceable than suggested by previously released singles. The ambient ‘Intro (The Full Horror)’, which posits listeners in a spectral soundscape, is followed by the booming trap track ‘Rawwwwww’ featuring American singer/songwriter Jozzy. Juliana Huxtable’s plaintive vocals feature over the eldritch droning backtrack on ‘Plunging Asymptote’, resembling an electric saw being passed through an arpeggiator. A lingering sense of existential dread turns contemplative on the sweeping fourth track, ‘The Dome’s Protection’, which sees Russian DJ Nina Kraviz narrating listeners through a meandering soundscape of spacey pads and ghostly, echoing vocals, describing “spheres and lines with invisible dimensions”.
By contrast, the midsection of the album delivers three fully-fledged dance-pop tracks in an airbrushed, mellowed-out style that represents a clear departure from the harshness of SOPHIE’s past projects. Banging opening single ‘Reason Why’ (featuring fellow trans artist and longtime collaborator Kim Petras) is perhaps the most obvious example of this shift, especially when comparing it with the unreleased version of the song. The racing BPM and harsh, distorted bass on the former are exchanged for a slower rhythm and bouncier more house-like bass on the latter. The resulting sound is distinctly more polished and mature, and yet—as we will see throughout the album—somehow more conventional than SOPHIE’s previous work. Twin tracks ‘Live In My Truth’ and ‘Why Lies’ (featuring BC Kingdom and LIZ) are glossy and intoxicating, if slightly unmemorable, odes to life and partying.
However; following the euphoric high brought on by LIZ’s cartoonishly pop vocals, the album plunges into a numbing comedown. ‘Do You Wanna Be Alive?’, features an intimidatingly cool BIG SISTER philosophising over a minimal techno beat while the track meanders in a way that resembles a backing track left to peter out at the end of a session. Similarly, ‘Berlin Nightmare’ and ‘One More Time’, released back-to-back as singles in July, lead listeners through a hostile terrain of ominous synths, ebbing and flowing towards a break before leaving them stranded. ‘Gallop’, a frenetic tech-house track true to its name, is short but sweet at 1:57; meanwhile, ‘Elegance’ confuses itself after a hard tempo switch three minutes in. The final quarter of the album returns to the sugary sweet vocals of Bibi Bourelly, Hannah Diamond, and Cecile Believe on tracks ‘Exhilarate’, ‘Always and Forever’, and ‘My Forever’ respectively, winding down to a well-rounded end with the yearning Doss-collaboration ‘Love Me Off Earth’.
There is much to praise about the album: its ventures into trap and techno on ‘Rawwwwww’ and ‘Gallop’ diversify SOPHIE’s work as a whole. ‘Plunging Asymptote’ and ‘Do You Wanna Be Alive?’ are blazingly original, and complement the sleek poppiness of ‘Reason Why’ and ‘Live In My Truth’. And yet, something is lacking.
Many of the slower songs read like eulogies, leaving a gaping hole in production that only serves to highlight SOPHIE’s absence. Her creative fingerprint feels weaker on this record than on the OOEPUI NONSTOP REMIX ALBUM despite featuring many of the same artists. One of the major problems with the album, more than its lack of cohesion and sometimes jarring tonal shifts, is that it sounds unfinished. The ‘backing track’ quality of some of the songs can be attributed to the fact that many of them either actually were backing tracks (as in the case of ‘Intro (The Full Horror)’) or were significantly paired back in production compared to previous iterations (‘Do You Wanna Be Alive?’, ‘Reason Why’).
Much of the difficulty in assessing this album, however, comes from the need to balance expectations about wanting to see more of the same from SOPHIE—the lacerated-metal kicks on ‘Faceshopping’, the heart-wrenching, ethereal vocals on ‘It’s Okay To Cry’, the exhilarating absurdity of ‘L.O.V.E.’—and respecting her creative journey. While SOPHIE was always intended to be a pop album complementary to her unabashedly experimental debut and was reportedly nearly finished at the time of her death, the extent to which the changes in production reflect the artist’s original vision remains unclear. What made PRODUCT and OOEPUI the pioneering projects that they were was their complete and utter fearlessness—each project was an expedition into an alien universe as beautiful as it was terrifying. Sonically, they were raw, almost amateurish—strewn with bizarre sound effects (from clanging pipes to fizzing liquids) that were at times almost too much to listen to; yet, conveyed a sense of raw emotion that is generally lacking in this latest release which feels unexpectedly safe.
Ultimately, expecting a replica of what made her debut album the genre-defining success that it was is an impossible demand, due as much to SOPHIE’s unrelenting musical audaciousness in her life as to her untimely death. Sadly, this means that what could have been a supernova of an album emerges nebulous from the years of production it has undergone since 2021. However, SOPHIE’s legacy extends far beyond this final release. As prolific in death as she was in life, her passing has inspired tributes on some of the most defining pop records of this generation, including Charli xcx’s BRAT, Caroline Polachek’s Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, and A. G. Cook’s Britpop. “Without my legs or my hair / Without my genes or my blood … / Where do I live? Tell me, where do I exist?”, she asks on OOEPUI’s ‘Immaterial’. The answer is everywhere.
