When a young artist of a certain caliber dies, a sort of myth-making takes place. In 2017, it happened to Lil Peep, a rising emo rapper whose overdose stunned his rapidly growing fanbase. And Pop Smoke in 2020, a promising Brooklyn drill rapper whose future was tragically cut short. More recently, it’s happened to Sophie, the 34-year-old Scottish producer and singer who transformed the landscape of pop music as we know it. Not much was known about her personal life when she was alive, but any available details have since been cobbled into a type of legend: a precocious, self-taught tinkerer of synths and sounds, she, with A.G. Cook’s PC Music, recalibrated pop’s future. Even in death, her life felt like a story still being written: One night in Athens in 2021, she journeyed to a rooftop to get a closer look at the night’s full moon, only to accidentally slip and fall.
Three years later, the musician’s final, posthumous album has arrived. Simply titled SOPHIE, it’s a 16-track odyssey of ambient, hard industrial techno, spoken-word meditation, and pristine pop, filled with features from a bevy of her friends, peers, and closest collaborators: Doss, Hannah Diamond, Cecile Believe, Kim Petras, Nina Kravitz, Bibi Bourelly, BC Kingdom, Popstar, and more. The music is dense and often unexpected; some of it might challenge or confuse certain long-time devotees. But it’s a feeling that should be embraced.
Sophie was a visionary—that’s indisputable. From her early days blurring the lines between dance and pop with songs like “Bipp” and “Lemonade” to her later expansion into hip-hop, dancehall, reggae, and rap, she exerted supreme control over each medium. She knew music could be beautiful, crystalline, the “brightest, most intense, engaging thing,” as she told Rolling Stone in 2015. But she knew it could also be grotesque, abrasive, in your face, unapologetic. The magic happened when she held both of these truths in her hands simultaneously, as on her debut album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. On songs like “Immaterial” and “It’s Okay To Cry,” she alchemized sounds that were both transcendent and earth-shaking. But it was her work with Charli XCX that arguably brought her the most visibility. Their maximalist and severe mutation of pop on songs like “Vroom Vroom,” one could say, prepped the world’s ears for the advent of hyperpop—and in turn, this summer’s wild success of Brat (which itself contains two tributes to the late producer).
All of this might contribute to why it feels a little disorienting at first to hear the music of SOPHIE, an album where restraint seems to be the governing theme. It opens with “Intro (The Full Horror),” an undulating, 4-minute-long ambient composition that drifts into existence, that’s followed by “Rawwwwww,” a spare rap track crafted with only percussion and warped bass, highlighting the ample negative space surrounding Jozzy’s raps. It’s followed by a club-pop arc of songs led in by “Reason Why” featuring Kim Petras and BC Kingdom, an equally modestly produced song that bops through a hook, and two brief verses. That bleeds into a dark techno arc with thumping bass and SOPHIE’s signature brash textures, playing with tempo but otherwise minimally adorned. The singer herself doesn’t appear once in voice form on the album; instead, all of the singing and speaking comes courtesy of her collaborators.
What to make of this? From all the information released to the public, the album was near completion at the time of her death—the tracklist even decided and finalized—and brought over the finish line predominantly by Ben Long, her brother and longtime producer and collaborator. Compared to other posthumous releases, SOPHIE theoretically holds the most of the singer’s artistic intention.
Still, though, there are lingering uncertainties. Long himself has said in interviews how much Sophie’s creative mind was always ticking, rushing to create the next thing and the next thing, often leaving previous projects unfinished. An errant mind listening to these songs might begin wondering if she truly would’ve released these songs in their current form, or if she would’ve continued to keep tinkering on these tracks had time allowed it. I sure wondered about it. But these are questions without answers. They form a gap of knowledge that can’t be reconciled; it’s the inevitable burden of art that comes out without its artist being alive to provide its context.
But this line of thinking is also a trap; SOPHIE’s release has already divided critics, with some exalting it as proof of her genius and others critiquing it as falling short of capturing the producer in all that she was. When we mythologize artists, it’s more often than not only their highs that get enshrined into history. We rarely see the space in-between, the tweaking, curious exploring, the tedious work, the unburdened play—which was, according to several of her collaborators, the exact conditions of how many of these songs got made. In a way, this album is all of Sophie, at least who she was in the years before she died.
The album’s last four stretch of songs is maybe where we get to see her the most clearly. Crafted with her closest collaborators, Doss, Hannah Diamond, Cecile Believe, and Bibi Bourelly, they are filled with lyrics that read like messages from the late singer herself. “What is it worth to love me on earth?” asks Doss on record’s soaring closer. That Sophie isn’t here to answer that herself opens a world of possibilities.
