What Would Sophie Do?
The mortality, and immortality, of the visionary producer’s posthumous album
When Sophie accidentally fell to her death in late 2021, at the age of 34, it was shocking: The aggressively forward-thinking producer was robbed of her own future. In the decade or so that she’d been releasing songs, Sophie had rewired certain corners of pop and electronic music with her ultra-tactile, hyper-unreal approach to sound. But in other ways, she was just getting started. Her 2018 debut full-length, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, was a more personal introduction to Sophie, beyond her elastic singles and bold productions for stars both mainstream (“Bitch I’m Madonna”) and cult classic (Charli XCX). The delicate ballad “It’s Okay to Cry” featured her own voice (which had typically been concealed by pitch-shifting and surrogate vocalists) as well as her physical self, in the now-indelible video, for the first time. With a single work, this visionary trans woman came out, planted a flag as a songwriter, and finally became herself in public.
The music on Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides was vulnerable, cheeky, joyful, hard as fuck, horrifying, heartbreakingly beautiful, and extremely thought-provoking. Songs like “Faceshopping” felt of a piece with Sophie’s early singles in their outsized, almost-violent beats and playful, pointed artificiality. “Immaterial” perfected the genre that Sophie had helped pioneer—hyperpop—while also serving as a trans anthem that imagined a future where immaterial boys and girls can create themselves anew. Others, like the industrial-ambient aria “Is It Cold in the Water?,” marked new experimental ground for Sophie. She made this more song-focused style fit into her club-minded world, and one unifying factor was Cecile Believe, the Canadian electro-pop artist who sang on most of the record’s nine tracks. The consistency of Believe’s melodic sensibility and voice—even if it wasn’t Sophie’s own, or had been manipulated—connected back to this idea of the album as a singular artist statement, straight from Sophie’s mind.
It would be difficult to follow up an album like Oil even in the best of circumstances. When Sophie died, she left behind hundreds of unfinished tracks, according to her brother and musical confidant Benny Long. She had been working on her next album for three years by the time she died, and was nearly done. As Long has detailed in interviews, Sophie envisioned the project having a four-part arc: an ambient start, then bangers for the pop girlies, flowing into a club-forward techno section before a celestial comedown. Her goal at that time was to align her recorded output more with her live DJ performances, which were genre- and bpm-spanning journeys.
If this was Sophie’s intention, then Sophie dutifully carries out her wishes. The posthumous album completed by Long follows her planned sonic arc, from darkness to the dancefloor to something even bigger than mortality. It also imagines Sophie’s universe on record as the communal affair it genuinely seemed to be, with spontaneous sessions emerging among friends. A lot of artists come to pay their respects: The record is jam-packed with guest vocalists, ranging from existential spoken-word from Nina Kraviz and Juliana Huxtable to Eurodance hooks warbled by Kim Petras and Bibi Bourelly. Eerily, some of the lyrics that were written before Sophie’s death speak to themes of grief, eternal love, and leaving this earth. (Worth mentioning: Sophie was a transhumanist, a philosophy rooted in, among other things, the idea that we can transcend our corporeal forms through technology.) Perhaps because of this vague melancholy and the revolving door of vocalists, though, the LP starts to feel a little like a Sophie tribute album. You can certainly feel the presence of Sophie’s production, but locating her fully in the shot sometimes requires squinting.
What does it say that the floaty ambient opening on Sophie is just as likely to lose me as some of the frothy pop stuff? Neither section feels perfectly calibrated, but the album thrives in the space between them. Literally, the middle of the record: the run of high-bpm songs that bridge the gap between the pop section and the techno section, starting with the BC Kingdom and Liz track “Why Lies” and through the multiple tracks each with Sophie’s girlfriend, Evita Manji, and someone called Popstar. (Also in this section: Big Sister, who I wasn’t familiar with before this, gabbing about getting it at the Dollar Tree atop cunty ’80s-electro beats.) These big-room tracks would have been amazing to witness in a Sophie live set, surely with some planetarium-ass visuals and the heaviest bass you’ve ever heard. They underscore that the rest of the album is less memorable, even dated-sounding in places, and less cohesive within the ambient and pop sections’ disparate vibes.
I accept that my opinion might be shaped by the Sophie I’ve idealized in my mind, focusing on the more avant-garde and conceptual sides of her work, which can happen when someone dies before they can fulfill their potential. I have not been able to stop thinking of a recent tweet from Elite Gymnastics’ Jaime Brooks, a frequent commentator on music Twitter: “biggest tragedy of sophie’s life was that she died so young. second biggest tragedy is the amount of time she spent in the LA producer ecosystem trying to pitch demos to wack A&Rs and land placements on big pop records. total waste of her time and talent.” Within the Sophie subreddit are fan reviews that express immense gratitude for the album while also picking up on the project’s unfinished nature. (One line I particularly liked: “It felt strange, almost like I was listening to an artist’s vision before it was fully realized.”) Comments like these, combined with the more commercial-sounding tracks on Sophie, get me thinking about the duality of Sophie’s legacy. Like her music, it’s slippery: She was a shooting star in electronic music, but she kept aiming for the pop world. Earnestly hopeful, but with an off-kilter musical sensibility.
Anyone who loves Sophie’s music surely has their own idealized version, and their own set of expectations for an album like this. Everyone’s answer to “What would Sophie do?” is a little bit different. Does that mean soundscapes that are equal parts visceral terror and bubble-popping fun? Does that mean smuggling weird sounds into gay dance-pop, trying to fuck up the club remix? I find myself wondering how a chain-smoking Sophie might have edited these 16 tracks into something sleeker, not so much narrowed in focus as stripped back to its essential transmissions. And I find myself thinking: This is not the Sophie music I would play for someone who doesn’t yet know her brilliance.
Posthumous projects can come across as cynical money-makers at worst, and directionless demo compilations at best. Lovingly finished by the artist’s musical family and friends, Sophie is the best-case scenario. It feels like a gift that it even exists, which makes it tricky to criticize, and perhaps that’s why the critical reception of the album has been a mix of extreme positivity and very quiet disappointment. You want to like it, and there are portions of it that I genuinely do. If Sophie fans are comforted by this record, or feel more connected to her, then it did its job. Maybe hearing PC Music princess Hannah Diamond chirp about a love that transcends time over ultra-poppy Sophie beats genuinely resonates in this way. But for me, the immortal Sophie song remains “Is It Cold in the Water?”.
The critic Sasha Geffen, in their excellent book Glitter Up the Dark, wrote of Un-Insides, “It’s not hard to read the album’s middle section as a transition narrative: Is it cold in the water? Should I jump? Should I unmake myself, not knowing what I’ll be on the other side? Do I give up the cells of what I know for an open plane I’ve never seen?” I’ve gravitated towards “Is It Cold in the Water?” so many times in the years since Sophie’s passing, awe-struck by the way Cecile Believe stretches out the word “cold” to operatic heights—like someone waiting at the top of a diving board, really taking their time with it. But the fear is screaming out in Sophie’s synth soundscape, and the juxtaposition between the elegant vocal melody and this grid of noise is truly startling. While still holding space for the transition narrative, I found myself reframing the song’s central question to be about death itself. As though I’m wondering into the void: Sophie, sweet genius, what happens when we leave this mortal plane?
