A final farewell to the era-defining sound of SOPHIE

Her debut album, 2018’s Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, used the sonic vocabulary she’d already established—synths that squelch and squish discomfitingly, the clatter of industrial machinery and red-lining car engines, uber-catchy hooks sung by steel-and-plastic androids—to explore ideas of gender fluidity and transhumanism. It was a reminder that pop music still mattered, that it still offered a potent means to interrogate and negotiate our notions of desire, beauty and self-hood. Along the way, there were collaborations with everyone from Madonna and Vince Staples to Charli XCX (the latter’s “brat summer" success owes much to the sound she and SOPHIE pioneered on 2006’s Vroom Vroom EP.)

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SOPHIE was close to wrapping up her follow-up album when she died—accidentally falling from her third floor Athens apartment—in January 2021. Her brother and long-time studio manager, Benny Long, has spent the past three years finishing it, doing his best to stay true to the producer’s aesthetic vision. Long was in the studio when many of these songs were recorded, and the two had discussed the album at length. Even so, it must have been a monumental—and heartbreaking—challenge, trying to finish a SOPHIE album without SOPHIE. 

Released on September 27, the producer’s eponymous final album consists of 16 tracks, ranging from moody ambient pieces and raw noise experiments to mutant doppelgangers of pop, house and techno. There’s the icy, dissonant rap of RAWWWWWW and the ready tropical hyper-pop of Reason Why, as SOPHIE filters four decades of dance music through her daringly innovative perspective. Some of these songs are among the best she’s ever written, hinting at new directions that the visionary producer could have taken in the coming years. 

But those “what ifs" also hang heavily over the album. Sometimes they recontextualise the music, adding a new layer of devastating heartbreak to songs like My Forever, which features Cecile Believe singing “you'll always be my forever" in a voice that drips with unadulterated yearning. At other times, these unanswerable questions haunt you as you listen. 

Would SOPHIE, who delighted in her unpredictability, have gone with this record’s straightforward progression from weird ambient to big-night-out pop to late night dance floor? Would she have made the same musical choices in the wake of an increasing tide of anti-trans and anti-queer violence, and yet another war in the Middle East? Is the softening of her music’s jagged extremities a sign of her creative evolution, or just an artefact of her absence? Fundamentally, can a posthumously completed album really do justice to the vision of an artist, particularly one as idiosyncratic and era-defining as SOPHIE? 

At its best, SOPHIE offers us snapshots of SOPHIE’s creative trajectory before her life was tragically cut short, final glimpses of her incredible talent. The buzzsaw synths of dystopian spoken-word/ambient piece Plunging Asymptote reaffirms her commitment to creating beauty out of broken, post-industrial noise, while the frenetic tempo of Elegance reminds us that for all her avant-garde sensibilities, SOPHIE always knew how to party hard. 

Tracks like Elegance and the gabba-throwback Gallop don’t exactly capture the awe-inspiring energy of her live sets, but they come close enough, and are probably already in rotation at clubs around the world. Elsewhere, Why Lies—featuring vocals by Liz and BC Kingdom—bounces with unrestrained joy, a party anthem for “immaterial boys and girls" that would fit perfectly into this summer’s playlists. Given that it was recorded at least three years ago, it offers more evidence, if any was needed, that SOPHIE was a musician way ahead of her time, presaging the sounds of the future. 

Far too often though, the music feels unfinished, missing the tiny details and inventive little flourishes that tied together the off-kilter and often contradictory elements of her sound. Live In My Truth’s 90s R&B homage should feel like an explosion of liberatory joy, but what really sticks with you is how domesticated it sounds, a defanged version of SOPHIE’s wild, untameable production. The gritty techno of Berlin Nightmare certainly leans into experimentation, but it never quite generates the required sense of surprise and frisson. It’s all a little too safe, a little too impersonal, without the tight coherence of the producer’s debut album. 

Perhaps the most affecting part of SOPHIE is its final four-track section, which harks back to the PC Music sound of the producer’s early years, and brings in old collaborators. Songs like the Hannah Diamond collab Always Forever and the afore-mentioned My Forever now feel like emotional goodbyes from old friends. When Diamond’s glistening, emotionally saturated voice sings “Forever and for always we'll be shining together/ And as the years go by you'll still be by my side," it's hard not to think of it as elegy to a departed friend and collaborator. 

Even here though, one wonders if SOPHIE would have been happy with such simple reconstructions of a sound she helped create and define, or if she’d be driven to iterate and improve on it. And perhaps that’s SOPHIE’s main achievement and success—it reminds you of just how irreplaceable an artist she was. And of all the glorious, chaotic, otherworldly musical futures we lost when we lost her. Maybe, instead of trying to define an artist’s legacy, that’s what a posthumous album is really supposed to do. Offer fans a way to remember the magnitude of their loss, and to imagine what could have been. On that count, at least, SOPHIE, wildly succeeds.

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