Some girls want to be known, while others prefer to remain obscure. Scottish-born singer and producer Sophie was for the girls who wanted to hide behind the mixer board while still crafting their own magic—and Sophie, her posthumous record, attempts to reconcile both of those ideals.
Known for the crunchy, glitchy production on her hard-hitting songs, Sophie cultivated an intensely private public profile, remaining all but unknown beyond her stage name before she came out as trans in 2017. She was a producer, in charge of her own image and sound, yet what she emanated more than anything was a kind of angelic alienism. Sophie only released one studio album—the highly acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides (2018)—and a mixtape during her lifetime, and both were heavily instrumental, with several songs featuring a single phrase repeated over and over, stretched almost to its linguistic limits, until robotic clamor and distortion took over. Her very earliest releases, like 2015’s “BIPP” and “Lemonade,” just floated in the ether for a while, with no one quite knowing their context or creator. (In 2021, Vince Staples recalled that some speculated Sophie was just another A.G. Cook project.) The 2017 visual for “It’s Okay to Cry”—which marked the first time most fans saw Sophie’s face—placed her before an ever-changing backdrop of clouds, rainbows, and a night sky full of stars, embracing a neither here-nor-there-ness, while the viciously playful video for “Faceshopping” from 2018 revels in wild manipulations of her visage. Harron Walker has previously written about the “dissociative” element in Sophie’s music, the way that it crystallizes being both present and absent at the same time, in the same body. Sophie channeled a more angelic plane, where bodies move in and out of visibility under the flashing club lights.
There was nothing ephemeral or ambiguous about her effect on electronic music, however. There’s electronic music before Sophie and electronic music after Sophie: She helped to define Charli XCX, and the hyper-pop sound more broadly, before going on to work with Staples, Cook, Kim Petras, Arca, Lady Gaga, and FKA Twigs. (On her recent album, Brat, Charli cannily called the late producer both “a hero and a human.”)
Sophie, out on September 27, reflects that layered legacy. The album was nearly complete when Sophie died due to a fall in January 2021; the track list was set and the foundations for the songs were well under way. (Sophie’s brother and sister, Benny and Emily Long, ended up finishing the record over the last three years.) The final product includes a few previously released recordings, but unlike her first album, on which Sophie often manipulated her own voice, this one features almost entirely external voices: There are appearances from Petras, Juliana Huxtable, Nina Kraviz, Liz, Bibi Bourelly, Hannah Diamond, Doss, and more. The frenetic collection doesn’t always cohere the way her conceptual debut did, but Sophie left an indelible mark on everything she touched.
Sophie’s pop and experimental inclinations battle it out on the new record as she tracks through trap, spoken-word poems, grimy hard-core beats, and more sparkly, straightforward pop melodies with glimmering production. Dense lyrics about trans-humanism and the nature of the universe over ethereal synths recur on multiple songs, including the Huxtable collab “Plunging Asymptote” and the sweeping, seven-minute “The Dome’s Protection” with Kraviz. Big Sister sings about “translucent infinity” and “deviant mythology” on the gloopy, dripping standout track “Do U Wanna Be Alive?,” her attitude expertly matching Sophie’s wry, mechanical production. Sophie’s crunchy club tracks dominate the latter half of the record. Songs like the hard-core “Elegance,” with Popstar, which morphs from one beat to another; or the looping, rhythmic “Berlin Nightmare,” with Sophie’s partner, Evita Manji. The dramatic keys of “One More Time” are broken by the Bourelly collaboration “Exhilarate,” with Bourelly’s voice gliding over a glitchy, slightly off-kilter beat.
The final three songs on Sophie may sound the most familiar to those best acquainted with her most popular collaborations, like “1, 2, 3 Dayz Up” with Petras. The sweet, transcendent “Always and Forever” is a collaboration with Diamond of PC Music fame. Cecile Believe, who often wrote and performed with Sophie and who supplied vocals on tracks like “Immaterial” from Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, comes back to take point on a slowed-down version of “My Forever”—a song previously featured on Sophie’s incredible “Heav3n Suspended” livestream from 2020—with its moving message about time and love. The album closer, “Love Me Off Earth,” sung by Doss and cowritten with Thora Siemsen and M Zavos-Costales, is one of the strongest songs of the bunch. “What is it worth to love me off earth?” Doss croons over the hyper-pop track, full of echoing synths, before her voice becomes an instrument in Sophie’s hands. (“Originally, my songwriting process was fueled by personal heartbreak, which has taken on a new meaning in the wake of her passing,” Siemsen tells me via email. “I don’t think it’s somber musically, though. It’s cathartic to dance to.”)
Various images of Sophie have bubbled to the surface in the years since her death: her red hair, her red lipstick, pictures of her in puffer coats in recording studios, smoking a cigarette, walking a donkey, bathed in neon light on a stage. Yet in life, she mostly liked to stay just out of frame. She produced more songs then she released herself, and while she appeared in her own music videos, she just as often released album art using AI-generated imagery of bizarre slides and coils.
“Without my legs or my hair,” Believe sings on “Immaterial,” “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?” Without delivering a straight answer, Sophie ventures some guesses on this new project, dancing on the edge of the earth.