(Transgressive/Future classic)
Completed by her brother after her accidental death in 2021, the experimental pop producer’s second album is among the most inventive records of the year.
Amischievously distorted “doo doot doo doo” announced the arrival of a singular artist in 2013. The track, Bipp, was not Sophie’s very first release. But this early, abstract banger ushered in a series of formally daring singles, later compiled as 2015’s Product album; warped earworms that were impossible to dislodge.
It was as though Aphex Twin had swallowed a 12-year-old girl’s Spotify account. This was playful, synthetic pop music – songs about love, or just as often, fizzy drinks – pared back to an austere digital minimalism; sounds so crisp and trickly, they sounded like CGI for the ears. And yet for all its foregrounded artifice, Sophie’s work spoke of heartache and yearning; of human connection. “I can make you feel better,” promised Bipp, kindly.
Sophie’s exquisite sound design eventually took her all the way to the mainstream, to work on records by Madonna and rapper Vince Staples, via a pivotal 2016 EP with Charli xcx. But it also took her more fully into herself.
It’s OK to Cry, the first track released from Sophie’s equally startling official debut album, Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides (2018), revealed not only the artist’s face and her (effects-laden) singing voice for the first time, but also her identity as a trans woman. Her commitment to pop’s plasticky nature was matched by a profound commitment to plasticity itself, with self-definition and states of flux as guiding principles. Oil featured increased attention to songcraft, but Sophie’s signature auditory provocation remained strong.
Many productions here are more house-trained than previously, rather than sly deconstructions
It’s still hard to believe that her second album proper arrives posthumously. With work on this record well under way, the producer died suddenly in 2021, falling from a building while trying to get a better view of the full moon. Outpourings of grief came from all quarters. There’s a moving Charli xcx song for her, So I, on Brat; fellow hyperpop producer AG Cook hymned her on his own recent record.
Sophie, chiefly completed by her brother Benny Long, who had worked alongside her as a mixing engineer and was privy to Sophie’s directorial intentions, is yet another curveball, one of the wriggliest, most inventive records of the year and one of the saddest. Over 16 tracks – all collaborations, and none sung by Sophie herself – it is different from its predecessors and yet fulfils their trajectories.
Sophie’s death unintentionally recontextualises some of the music with a shiver, or a tear. Do You Wanna Be Alive? asks a collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Big Sister that thrums moodily out of the speakers, becoming just a bassline and a string of pearls bouncing on to a hard surface. Always and Forever is a melancholy love song featuring Sophie’s longtime acquaintance Hannah Diamond (both were affiliated with AG Cook’s seminal record label and art collective PC Music). It’s impossible not to hear its words as framing Sophie’s loss: “Forever and always, be shining together.”
Many productions here are more house-trained than previously, rather than sly deconstructions. Sophie was making a pop album. The mischief is toned right down for Exhilarate, which features singer Bibi Bourelly (also a backroom writer for Rihanna) and is epic and melancholy; the track’s four-dimensional vocal arrangements are its most hyperpop aspect. Fellow trans figurehead Kim Petras helms the banging Reason Why, pretty much a textbook upmarket Sophie showreel.
Yet just as often, Sophie remains hard to parse; unforeseeable. Film soundtracks loom large early on, particularly on the solemn neoclassicism of Intro (The Full Horror). Both Plunging Asymptote and The Dome’s Protection retain this cinematic flavour, foregrounding oblique voiceovers from two very different contributors, Juliana Huxtable (another multidisciplinary American artist) and Nina Kraviz (a Russian producer and DJ); the former was previously released under the project name Analemma.
The dancefloor remains a gleaming podium for Sophie’s wares. A pair of techno-inclined tracks (Berlin Nightmare and the self-fulfilling prophecy of Gallop) made with Evita Manji, Sophie’s partner at the time of her accident, go hard in their own ways. At the same time, they lend the centre of the tracklisting an intimate heart. If there are two very minor caveats attached to Sophie they are these: that thanks to the weight of collaborators fronting the tracks, it feels somehow less personal, at least lyrically and thematically, than its very forthright predecessor, and that the taut cogency of Sophie’s previous outings has been replaced by versatility on what is, ultimately, a wide-ranging tour de force.
The shock of the new tends to only work once: we expect Sophie to sound a certain way now. Perhaps the freshest track here is Rawwwwww, with rapper Jozzy, a gothic post-trap outing full of spacious murk. Hip-hop may make up just a small sliver of her discography, but Sophie was a natural shoo-in for its icy 21st-century iteration. Her unfulfilled promise in that field is just another aching regret to toss on to an already teetering pile.
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This is amazing