What Would Sophie Do?

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.