In 2013, a mysterious producer named Sophie released “Bipp,” a minimalist club track that sounded like it had been formed on another planet and squeezed through hyperdrive before arriving on ours. “Bipp” was black space latticed with radically strange objects: a rubbery squelch of a bass beat, a melodic line like a laser coated in latex, percussive punctuation marks that seemed to morph from plasma into steel. Sophie continued releasing singles, each one accompanied by a 3-D rendering of a ladderless slide. The objects looked the way the songs sounded, like uncanny candy—slick, chemical, jaw-breakingly hard.
At the time, not much was known about Sophie. She was associated with the collective PC Music, which specialized in the aggressively, gleefully synthetic. With the producer A. G. Cook, Sophie put out a catchy PC Music single called “Hey QT,” a promotional jingle for a fake energy drink, QT, which, in 2015, was distributed to concert attendees in a stunt at SXSW. This micro-era was a peak of absurd corporate branding in music—for the past few years, SXSW artists had performed inside a giant vending machine sponsored by Doritos. On the rare occasions when Sophie gave interviews, her answers played into the perception that the subversive intent of the PC Music project revolved around commerciality. She’d picked the name Sophie, she said, because it “tastes good and it’s like moisturizer.” Her influences were “shopping, mainly.” She wondered if music could work like a theme-park roller coaster, leaving you nauseated and laughing, then leading you to purchase a key ring. “Lemonade,” another brain-scrambling single, collected on a 2015 Sophie compilation called “Product,” appeared in a McDonald’s commercial for lemonade.
Critics, perceiving cynicism, responded cynically. And, though Sophie shielded her voice and face from journalists, she was, as far as anyone knew, a male producer from Scotland. This was interpreted, in the argot of the time, as problematic and appropriative; the musician Grimes, talking about Sophie to the Guardian, in 2015, called her use of a female stage name “really fucked up.” Still, Sophie’s work sliced through the discursive sideshow and the ad-agency theatrics—if you heard it on a dance floor in the liminal hours, it felt like a battleship had plowed through the walls. Nothing else sounded like Sophie, because she made her sounds from scratch. She didn’t sample; she built each hiss and smack and boom by manipulating raw waveforms. She wanted to get to the “molecular level of a particular sound,” to understand why that sound “behaves a certain way when processed or cooked.” The music was Dippin’ Dots; it was Vantablack. It was funny, too, and amazingly direct, often communicating a sweetness that crossed the valley of the saccharine to emerge on the mountaintop of the pure. On “Bipp,” the hook has a ballad’s simple yearning: “I could make you feel better, if you let me / I could make you feel better, if you want to.”
The conditional formulation suffused Sophie’s music, both foundationally—if she altered X sound in Y new way, then Z would be the result—and in the themes of many of her songs. There was a sense that transformation was the point and the teleology; Sophie’s sonic plasticity pointed to interrelational reinvention, toward a truth that had to be formed in the primordial tide pool of a dark, pulsing room. Sophie released her début album, “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides,” whose lead single, “It’s Okay to Cry,” featured her own vocals—the first time she sang on her own track. The video, released in 2017, showed her in closeup, glamorous and bare-breasted, with glossy lipstick and a wedge of sunset-red hair, in front of a changing daydream of a sky. It functioned as a coming-out statement: Sophie was a woman.
In the publicity for “O.E.P.U.I.,” more about Sophie’s life emerged. She’d grown up in Glasgow; her dad had taken her to raves when she was little; she’d worked as a wedding d.j. She was trans, and selective in the way she spoke about her identity. “I try to talk about it through my music,” she said. The album, for its part, told the story of an artist stretching toward deliverance. Amorphous experimental tracks conjured Romantic visions of the sublime—raging seas, scintillating light—as deftly as the songs on “Product” had conjured bubbles and rubber and mutating plastic. A pop song, “Immaterial,” featuring Cecile Believe, referenced Madonna and burst with wild, wheeling joy; its lyrics reached past transformation into the realm of transubstantiation. “You could be me and I could be you / Always the same and never the same / Day by day, life after life,” Believe sang. She asked, “Without my legs or my hair, without my genes or my blood / With no name and with no type of story / Where do I live? / Tell me, where do I exist?” The answer: in the song. A few years before, Sophie had been asked about Richard Dawkins’s idea that genes are just digital information—that, thus, life itself was digital. “Yeah QT,” she’d replied. She had translated her life and her questions into these new sounds, evincing some personal ethic of the transhuman and the trans human, in which states of flux could be captured in digital permanence, in which alteration was how you approached the divine.
During the pandemic, unreleased Sophie tracks spilled onto the Internet, the result of hacks and leaks and rips from live sets. She’d reached, more or less, the mainstream—she’d produced songs for Madonna and Vince Staples, and, working on Charli XCX’s “Vroom Vroom” EP, she’d instantiated the aural style that would result in “brat” entering the narrative of the 2024 Presidential election. She was working on a new album. Then, at the beginning of 2021, Sophie fell to her death from a balcony in Athens. Her representatives said she’d gone out to look at the moon. She was mourned publicly by Nile Rodgers and Rihanna. “If you make contemporary music u have been inspired by sophie whether u know it or not,” the producer Benny Blanco wrote. She was just thirty-four.
Sophie’s self-titled posthumous album comes out this week, on Transgressive and Future Classic. According to her labels, the album was nearly finished at the time of her death; it was completed by the people closest to her, including her brother, the producer Benny Long. In 2021, Long said that the two of them had discussed working on a simple cycle: releasing an experimental record, then a pop record, and then back and forth for many years. This is Sophie’s final album—there are no plans to complete and release more of the hundreds of tracks Long has said she had in the vault—and, abiding by her plan, it’s a pop record, a long and capacious and digressive one, with sixteen tracks, almost double the number on “O.E.P.U.I.”
Superfans have speculated about the album’s track list for months, correctly suspecting that many of the songs are already floating around the Internet. A group that tends to be drawn toward Sophie at her most aggressive, they’ll notice the absence of some high-octane old favorites. (Those of us who long to hear a final mix of the bank-robbery joyride “Burn Rubber” will have to keep dreaming.) Some will quibble with the album’s relative gentleness. A posthumous album is inevitably pressed into service as a grief repository, particularly in the case of Sophie, an artist who frequently pulled off the inexplicable—who gave off a limitlessness and a singular intensity that seemed capable even of circumventing death.
“Sophie” begins with a queasy, beautiful bit of ambient, then drops into a pristine rap track featuring Jozzy and a plunging, rumbling, weapons-grade bass. The next two songs conjure journeys through outer space, one jarring and one wondrous. From then on, the album opens up into a dance-floor odyssey, a fluid blend of trance, pop, and techno. Sophie’s hallmarks are here: the album is funny, most notably on a track called “Do You Wanna Be Alive,” and her ability to instantly conjure an obscure physical analogue for a sound is on full display. On “Live in My Truth,” there’s a sound that feels exactly like the side-to-side skitter that one’s vision does under a certain tipping point of chemical derangement. “Gallop” feels like you’re being knitted into a spiderweb of hard filaments, a million strands in every direction, each of them vibrating to the beat. But the album is welcoming; newcomers won’t be turned away at the door. “Sophie” isn’t an expression of Sophie’s journey as much as it is a guide for everyone else’s—a last gift.
The album also serves as a reminder of what Sophie had already changed. Her career began at a time when underground-adjacent dance music leaned masculine. Today, the dance floor has been thoroughly feminized and re-queered, leaving this album with nothing to demonstrate or explain. On “Why Lies,” BC Kingdom sings, “I just wanna party with my friends / To the end of the world, immaterial boys and girls / So please save that drama for your mama and daddy and your granny.” The commercial flirtations of Sophie’s work a decade ago led, eventually, to hyperpop—a genre that was effectively named and commercialized by Spotify, and which has nonetheless given rise to a diverse crop of independent artists. “Sophie” pulls back from this world of candy-and-gasoline excesses with a self-assurance that feels lavish in itself.
A message coalesces in the album’s final run of tracks—four songs keyed toward love, devotion, presence, transcendence. The soaring “Exhilarate,” featuring Bibi Bourelly, best known for writing “Bitch Better Have My Money” for Rihanna, sounds like joy and grief cresting simultaneously in the back of your throat. On the last song, a thumper called “Love Me off Earth,” the vocal line, sung by Doss, is transposed higher, sideways, higher, echoing, dematerializing. There was a time when everyone said that Sophie sounded like the future; to me, this album sounds like the present continuous. It sounds like Sophie’s behind the table, in the club, like she’s turning up the voltage toward euphoria, like the crowd is moving still. ♦
