WHAT EVERYONE SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT THIS WEEK
A posthumous release that bridges SOPHIE’s visionary pop and challenging electronica, this week’s ‘SOPHIE’ showcases 16 tracks of pure sonic innovation, featuring collaborations with Hannah Diamond, Kim Petras, and others, while cementing her legacy as a musical genius who forever changed the landscape of modern pop music.
Words: Martyn Young.
In January 2013, the then largely unknown producer SOPHIE released her debut single ‘Nothing More To Say’ on the small underground electronic label Huntleys+Palmers and changed the face of modern pop music. The single came accompanied by a quote that described SOPHIE’s vision in pure and simple terms. “I try to make music which is fun to dance to – that should be the loudest voice talking. I think it would be extremely exciting if music could take you on the same sort of high-thrill three-minute ride as a theme park roller coaster.”
The comparison to the ecstatic abandon of the rollercoaster ride aligned with that creeping sense of foreboding fear is fitting for a career in which SOPHIE traversed effortlessly between pure pleasure and macabre dread on her wildly inventive and thrilling music. It was a journey that took her from the mind-bending futuristic pop of her fizzing and playful productions collected on her early collection ‘Product’, to reshaping the career of Charli xcx with the iconic ‘Vroom Vroom’, to being sought out by the likes of Madonna as one of the most in-demand artists in the world. Her debut album in 2018 saw an added emotional prism to her electronic productions on the sprawling and heartstopping ‘Oil Of Every Pearls Un-Insides’. It was also around this time that she began to use her own voice and image in her music as she opened up about being transgender in a hugely inspiring way.
In 2021, however, tragedy struck, and SOPHIE was killed in an accident in Athens, Greece, as she fell from the rooftop of a building in Athens, Greece, after attempting to take a picture of a full moon. Her legacy was cut short, but her influence has only grown in the intervening years as artists across the musical spectrum remember her genius and pay tribute to her in their own work. Indeed, in 2024, a number of artists have released songs honouring SOPHIE. Charli xcx showed that ‘Brat’ wasn’t all about hedonism with a beautifully tender ballad called ‘So I’ in which she lamented her slightly fractured relationship with SOPHIE in the last years of her life, while her longtime friend and close collaborator A. G. Cook released ‘Without’ in which he interpolated the lyrics to her signature song ‘Bipp’ as he remembered his friend and inspiration.
Despite all the tributes and good intentions, though, the question of how to meaningfully honour SOPHIE’s musical legacy is a thorny one. She was incredibly prolific and always creating, always striving for a new sound that had never been heard before. She was both a technical genius and a pop visionary. The internet is full of unreleased SOPHIE productions, snippets of songs uploaded to Soundcloud, muffled rips of DJ sets, and numerous rumours of mythical collaborations and mythical songs, but nothing tangible and nothing that could replace the vast void left by her passing. 2024 feels like the right time to try to bring something together to celebrate her life and her legacy with the release of her second studio album, ‘SOPHIE’.
Posthumous albums are notoriously difficult things. Often seen as a move by companies eager to cash in on the name of the deceased artist, they are rarely cohesive and meaningful works of art but often grab bag, slapdash facsimiles of what made the artist special. Think, for example, of the bland and throwaway pointlessness of Amy Winehouse’s ‘Lioness’ or the plain weirdness of the posthumous Michael Jackson albums. ‘SOPHIE’ is fortunately a world away from that sort of ugly consumerism. The album was helmed by her brother, Ben Long, who worked closely alongside her on almost all of her music as her studio engineer. Along with her two other siblings, they worked on music that was largely finished and completed with fully realised arrangements and concepts by SOPHIE. This album ties together these concepts in a collection that feels like a proper record. It feels like SOPHIE’s vision, and you can feel her inimitable presence on every one of these 16 tracks.
Despite the obvious reverential care and attention to make this an album that honours her legacy and her vision, the question remains: should this actually exist at all? Is it an act of artistic vandalism to take the unfinished work of a visionary artist and release it once they are no longer with us? A lot of SOPHIE fans have their own ideas of what she represents, what her music should be, and what it should sound like. It should be pop, but not too pop. It should be weird, but not that weird. A lot of people might lament the tracklist here and wonder where their favourite unreleased song from a DJ mix in 2017 is or quibble with some of the collaborators. The truth is, though, that this is firmly and indisputably a SOPHIE album, and the bittersweetness of its existence at all only serves to amplify the beauty and the abrasive darkness just like her music has always done.
It was long rumoured that her second album would be her big pop breakthrough, an album that built upon the giddy hyperpop explosion of perhaps her greatest song ‘Immaterial’ from her debut album. ‘SOPHIE’ doesn’t quite deliver that all the way through; instead, it weaves its ecstatic pop moments within a tracklisting that fluctuates between moods and light and shade in almost equal effect. When it gets dark, it gets really, really dark as on the opening track, ‘Intro (The Full Horror)’, which is four and a half minutes of deathly ambient swells and absolutely nothing else.
That same feeling of displacement and bewitching eerie calm is present on ‘The Dome’s Protection’ featuring a spoken word monologue delivered by techno DJ Nina Kraviz as she talks gravely about a dystopian future of new dimensions and future discovery. As the album progresses, the twin impulses of joyous pop and challenging electronica rub against each other with first the three-pronged joy of lead single ‘Reason Why’ featuring Kim Petras and BC Kingdom, a track SOPHIE was playing in her DJ sets in 2019, and ‘Live In My Truth’ and ‘Why Lies’ both featuring pop singer LIZ and BC Kingdom. These tracks are among the most purely satisfying pop songs SOPHIE has ever produced and a sign that she was at the point where she could effortlessly combine her insidious, malleable beat and sound mastery with sugary-sweet pure pop melodies.
The pop songs on here are frothy and ebullient, but the real highlights are driven by the hard-edged techno that provides those exhilarating thrills just like that roller coaster. A lot of the work here is driven by her DJ sets and how she used them as a vehicle to really feel the music she was making. There is a sense of driving propulsion to the razor-sharp directness of ‘Berlin Nightmare’ and ‘Gallop’ both featuring Evitia Manji, while ‘Elegence’ is a masterful display of how SOPHIE could make so little do so much. You can’t help but marvel at the insane drum sounds she makes on these techno songs. Speaking to Dork earlier this year, A. G. Cook enthused that no one could quite make music like SOPHIE. “SOPHIE was so skilled at making a hybrid between her concepts and actual physical scientific sounds of the drums and the synthesis,” he said. “That’s all her. No one has really done it at that level.”
The collaborators on the album are all people firmly within SOPHIE’s universe who have their own distinct relationships with her. Nobody has been parachuted in because they need a big star. These are all people SOPHIE believed in and who shared her vision of the transcendent power of music.
One of the earliest people to share that vision with her is PC Music and alt-pop legend Hannah Diamond. When SOPHIE passed away, Hannah wrote a beautifully tender message on Instagram in which she said, “Loving SOPHIE and being a part of her journey feels like the most precious gift the universe has given me for my lifetime.” In that context, the gossamer smooth lullaby ballad of ‘Always and Forever’ is impossibly beautiful. “Sometimes I just want to fly into the night, transcending time,” sings Hannah as her crystalline voice soars above SOPHIEs’ bubbling and twinkling soundscape. It’s an incredible moment.
The album closes with another couple of hopeful and inspiring pop songs, ‘My Forever’ featuring Cecile Believe and ‘Love Me Off The Earth’ featuring Doss, that remind you of that early vision that SOPHIE had way back in 2013: that nothing was more powerful than the desire to make music to dance to, and pop that sounds like nothing else. ‘SOPHIE’ might be the last music we ever get to hear from an iconic artist; in that sense, it stands as a joyous celebration of her genius and a record that points the way forward to a new direction that sadly will never now be fulfilled.
If a young, creative outsider, intrigued by who SOPHIE is in 2024, discovers her music for the first time with this record and goes on to make the most warped, bonkers and ridiculously brilliant electronic pop music after diving into the bountiful treasure trove she left behind, then this album has easily answered the question, should it exist? It exists because SOPHIE exists, and her memory will carry on forever in art, culture, and life itself. Just like we never said goodbye.
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