A mischievously distorted “doo doot doo doo” introduced the arrival of a singular artist in 2013. The observe, Bipp, was not Sophie’s very first launch. However this early, summary banger ushered in a collection of formally daring singles, later compiled as 2015’s Product album; warped earworms that had been unattainable to dislodge.
It was as if Aphex Twin had swallowed a 12-year-old woman’s Spotify account. This was playful, artificial pop music – songs about love, or simply as typically, fizzy drinks – pared again to an austere digital minimalism; sounds so crisp and trickly, they gave the impression of CGI for the ears. And but for all its foregrounded artifice, Sophie’s work spoke of heartache and craving; of human connection. “I could make you are feeling higher,” promised Bipp, kindly.
Sophie’s beautiful sound design ultimately took her all the best way to the mainstream, to work on data by Madonna and rapper Vince Staples, by way of a pivotal 2016 EP with Charli xcx. Nevertheless it additionally took her extra absolutely into herself.
It’s OK to Cry, the primary observe launched from Sophie’s equally startling official debut album, Oil Of Each Pearl’s Un-Insides (2018), revealed not solely the artist’s face and her (effects-laden) singing voice for the primary time, but in addition her id as a trans girl. Her dedication to pop’s plasticky nature was matched by a profound dedication to plasticity itself, with self-definition and states of flux as guiding ideas. Oil featured elevated consideration to songcraft, however Sophie’s signature auditory provocation remained robust.
It’s nonetheless laborious to consider that her second album correct arrives posthumously. With work on this file properly beneath manner, the producer died immediately in 2021, falling from a constructing whereas attempting to get a greater view of the total moon. Outpourings of grief got here from all quarters. There’s a transferring Charli xcx track for her, So I, on Brat; fellow hyperpop producer AG Prepare dinner hymned her on his personal current file.
Sophie, mainly accomplished by her brother Benny Lengthy, who had labored alongside her as a mixing engineer and was aware of Sophie’s directorial intentions, is yet one more curveball, one of many wriggliest, most creative data of the yr and one of many saddest. Over 16 tracks – all collaborations, and none sung by Sophie herself – it’s completely different from its predecessors and but fulfils their trajectories.
Sophie’s demise unintentionally recontextualises a number of the music with a shiver, or a tear. Do You Wanna Be Alive? asks a collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Huge Sister that thrums moodily out of the audio system, changing into only a bassline and a string of pearls bouncing on to a tough floor. All the time and Ceaselessly is a melancholy love track that includes Sophie’s longtime acquaintance Hannah Diamond (each had been affiliated with AG Prepare dinner’s seminal file label and artwork collective PC Music). It’s unattainable to not hear its phrases as framing Sophie’s loss: “Ceaselessly and at all times, be shining collectively.”
Many productions listed here are extra house-trained than beforehand, reasonably than sly deconstructions. Sophie was making a pop album. The mischief is toned proper down for Exhilarate, which options singer Bibi Bourelly (additionally a backroom author for Rihanna) and is epic and melancholy; the observe’s four-dimensional vocal preparations are its most hyperpop facet. Fellow trans figurehead Kim Petras helms the banging Purpose Why, just about a textbook upmarket Sophie showreel.
But simply as typically, Sophie stays laborious to parse; unforeseeable. Movie soundtracks loom massive early on, significantly on the solemn neoclassicism of Intro (The Full Horror). Each Plunging Asymptote and The Dome’s Safety retain this cinematic flavour, foregrounding indirect voiceovers from two very completely different contributors, Juliana Huxtable (one other multidisciplinary American artist) and Nina Kraviz (a Russian producer and DJ); the previous was beforehand launched beneath the mission identify Analemma.
The dancefloor stays 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 companion on the time of her accident, go laborious in their very own methods. On the similar time, they lend the centre of the tracklisting an intimate coronary heart. If there are two very minor caveats hooked up to Sophie they’re these: that due to the load of collaborators fronting the tracks, it feels one way or the other much less private, a minimum of lyrically and thematically, than its very forthright predecessor, and that the taut cogency of Sophie’s earlier outings has been changed by versatility on what’s, finally, a wide-ranging tour de pressure.
The shock of the brand new tends to solely work as soon as: we anticipate Sophie to sound a sure manner now. Maybe the freshest observe right here is Rawwwwww, with rapper Jozzy, a gothic post-trap outing filled with spacious murk. Hip-hop might make up only a small sliver of her discography, however Sophie was a pure shoo-in for its icy Twenty first-century iteration. Her unfulfilled promise in that subject is simply one other aching remorse to toss on to an already teetering pile.
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