SOPHIE Deserved Better
A posthumous album curated by her family and collaborators is well-intentioned, but fails to capture the magic of the one-of-a-kind artist.
Background
The death of the acclaimed producer and artist SOPHIE in 2021 was truly one of the most tragic and unexpected celebrity passings that I have been alive to witness. It’s been reiterated time and time again that “only the good die young”, but in this case, it was very much the truth. At the ripe age of 34, Sophie’s powerful influence had shook the landscape of music, fashion and culture at large. Her role alongside A.G. Cook in defining the PC Music sound, which would later become broadly known as “hyperpop”, is something that I think will be studied by future generations. In a world where every movie is a remake and every Top 40 hit is just a copy of what’s already worked, Sophie dared to come to the table with brand new ideas.
Her early singles like “Lemonade” and “VYZEE” threaded this tongue-in-cheek skewering of commercialism with seriously idiosyncratic production. Although she was a student of the game of electronic and pop music, what she came up with sounded like something the world had never heard before. The organic rubber stretching synths and clanking pots and pans drum work felt almost like it was spun totally out of thin air. What synth could produce such a noise? Presets be damned! Many artists arrived on the scene fresh, became indie darlings, and were phased out with a 6.2 by Pitchfork on their subsequent releases. Sophie never conformed to this cycle. Instead, she spread her talents in all directions.
Perhaps the most notable collaboration she did was with everyone’s favorite pop girl of the current moment, Charli xcx. The music they made together for the Vroom Vroom EP, as well as Charli’s mixtape Number 1 Angel and her unreleased XCX World were all pure magic. Sophie just truly understood the party animal that was inside Charli, matching her frantic energy with strange, yet hard as fuck instrumentals. Sophie also collaborated with Vince Staples for his Big Fish Theory LP, which is still his best work to date. These two major collabs as well as some spare singles really solidified her as a force on the production end, but she wasn’t done.
In 2017, she dropped what I consider to be one of the very best debut albums of all time, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. I ranked it number 82 on my greatest albums of all time list, and with some more years on it, it’ll crack the Top 50 or more. The record is a true work of art, a top-to-bottom showcase of versatility and style that left its mark on the world of music. Would the 100 gecs or Fraxiom exist without her? While the dazzling and revealing opener “It’s Okay To Cry” really pulled at our heartstrings, she immediately subverted expectations with “Pony Boy” and “Faceshopping”, the sonic equivalent of getting curb stomped. She was a master at marrying harshness and brutality with pink hued beauty. We got pop flips, ambient drones and even a 9-minute closer called “Whole New World/Pretend World” that still haunts me to this day.
This, a subsequent remix record and her previous compilation Product were really all we got from her before her tragic passing in Greece — until now.
This Release Is Unreviewable
I wrote that summary of her legacy that you just read on the day that the posthumous record known as Sophie was first announced, alongside the single “Reason Why”. The song was mediocre and unfinished, definitely not up to Sophie’s quality standards (the 2021 Product leftover “UNISIL” is a better representation of her true sound in my opinion.) The features from Kim Petras and BC Kingdom were nothing special, teetering on bad. Since the PC Music days, the features on her tracks always acted as stand ins for the “Sophie” character, almost like she was delegating the role to a person. It was fucking genius, like an even more dystopian Gorillaz or Hatsune Miku. When the octaves got too high for Sophie to hit on a song like “Immaterial”, she’d call up someone like Cecile Believe to seamlessly swap herself into this world to be “Sophie”. By totally avoiding that dynamic on this “Reason Why” single, it almost defeats the purpose of the artist’s thesis. Maybe this was a new direction she was going in, but if so, we never really got a clear message about that from her, something just felt off. I would love to say that I wrote this song off as a fluke and kept anticipating this record, but I absolutely knew this would be a nonstarter as soon as I saw this album cover.
Compare that to this to her debut, an A++ record if there ever was one:
They say don’t judge a book by it’s cover, but that doesn’t apply to albums. A good album cover can’t make bad music good, but it typically speaks to a certain amount of effort put in by the artist and their camp. The debut record cover is synthetic, serene, a little eerie, and painted with beautiful colors, just like the album. The posthumous record cover (I refuse to call it a sophomore album) looks like it was made in 5 minutes in an Adobe 3D rendering software. I understand that art direction is limited when an artist isn’t alive to do photoshoots and press pictures, but it’s clear very little thought was put into the cover. Aesthetically, this is not who Sophie was.
Astute fans of ANTIART know that I always start my reviews with a grade. I must make an exception this one time because this project is a complete non-starter. By this, I mean it is labeled on Wikipedia, Pitchfork, and everywhere relevant as a “Sophie” release, and a “sophomore record”. At best, what we have here is a professionally curated tribute compilation featuring some of SOPHIE’s close collaborators over unfinished, looped bits her production. I don’t want to focus on the “at worst”, but let’s go down the rabbit hole of being uncharitable just for a moment. For the sake of keeping it real as a “journalist”.
Let’s just exclude her sister Emily from this conversation because by all accounts, she followed the lead of her brother who is a professional studio engineer that worked with Sophie on her debut. Her intentions of honoring her sister’s memory seem genuine, not that her brothers don’t but I’ll explain. I want to focus on her brother Ben and some of his quotes regarding this project, considering that he is essentially of the surviving mastermind behind it.
In a profile from the New York Times, Ben outlines how the record came to be, how much of it was complete before Sophie’s death, and what her input was. My major issue with this article is that its writer — 70-year old veteran music journalist Jon Pareles — is seemingly unfit to give pushback. When her brother says “Sophie would never want to finish anything. She’d always want to move on to the next thing. She was just wanting to create, create, create, which now I’m super thankful for. But at the time I was like, ‘Should we not just finish this?’”, this is an obvious red flag. Great art cannot be hurried, Sophie had dropped a very lengthy and substantive remix record in 2019, and the pandemic had just started. She was using this time to work through ideas and spend time with friends in Greece, what was the rush exactly? Arca hasn’t dropped since like 2021, Frank Ocean hasn’t followed up on Blonde in eight years, and she is just as enigmatic and purposeful as these people. She had the privilege of time until sadly she didn’t, God rest her soul. The question of “should we not just finish this?” is one that the engineer will always ask, but the artist can always just say “no”. When are we getting the debut Jai Paul album? Never? That’s ok! It’s his choice.
As human beings, we are not mind readers. When Ben says "would she want this album to come out or would she not? And she definitely would”, how could he say this with certainty? There is no evidence of her saying that her album was done, and even if she did, that doesn’t mean it was. It is deeply unclear if this project was 10%, 50% or 99.999% finished, and therefore, it calls into question what input was Sophie’s and what was Ben’s. If this is being sold as a solo record and over 50% of the decisions were made by Ben, than the label of “solo” becomes a little dubious. Would Sophie have had a feature on every song, or four features from BC Kingdom? Only she knows that. According to an article from the Guardian, the 16-song track list was “roughly sketched out”. However, Jon Pareles writes “The new album was so close to completion that Sophie had chosen the full track list.” Ben is also quoted with saying "we discussed everything about it — the themes, the track list.” The song choices and how they are placed goes from rough sketch, to discussed, to being fully chosen by Sophie herself. This discrepancy is not the fault of Ben, but of lazy journalists who fail to pin down objective facts. My speculation here is that because her death is such a raw and sensitive issue, the music itself is not up for debate. The focus is on honoring her memory, her brother’s heart is clearly in the right place, so therefore, no follow-up questions are asked. Maybe to most people that’s ok, but as one of millions of fans that deeply connected to her positive message, I demand a little more transparency, that’s all.
I’d like to be careful to reiterate that I actually have no issue with her music being posthumously released, but it has to be done the right way. This weekend at the newly re-opened club Rash NYC, friends of Sophie like SFIRE and Jimmy Edgar DJed, spun fan-favorite leaks and classic cuts. I had a fucking blast dancing to XCX World leaks and deep cuts like “L.O.V.E”. Hell, even “Reason Why” sounded a little better in this environment. This was a fitting way to put some of these fan favorite and rare hard drive files out into the world, many of them were already being tested by Sophie herself in clubs before her passing. Her family could’ve also set up an online archive where the fans could stream the works in their unfinished state, with some basic mixing and mastering to make them listenable. I also would not have been mad if they just labeled Sophie as a tribute compilation, almost like a posthumous version of her first release Product. The key here is honesty, which Sophie fans deeply value. Was the tracklist finalized? No. Were all these features supposed to be on here? We don’t know. Any release of this music to the public should reflect that, and this one simply doesn’t.
An Attempted Review
I don’t know Sophie, her intentions and I cannot read her mind. With that said, I would bet my entire life savings that she would have never in a million years released this project. Her debut was a coming out party of sorts, with her first single revealing her trans identity to the world. This was after Grimes was quoted as saying “I think it’s really fucked up to call yourself Sophie and pretend you're a girl when you're a male producer and there are so few female producers” Sophie was here to say, respectfully and artistically, I don’t think I’m a woman, I am one. Grimes later apologized.
By all accounts, the working title for the follow-up was Trans World, which I could only assume would dig deeper into the themes of the first album. At the very least, the record would’ve subverted expectations and delivered a perspective that only Sophie could. What we end up with is 16 baffling leaks in various states of completion. While her debut felt like a concise blend of pummeling electronic music, glistening hyperpop, and ambient passages, this record pulls all those wonderful elements apart and lays them bare for no apparent reason. It’s like eating raw, unwashed vegetables and fruits with a side of almond milk instead of drinking a smoothie.
“Intro (The Full Horror)”, “Elegance” and “The Dome’s Protection” posture towards the avant garde, but end up boring and overlong. “Living In My Truth” or “RAWWWWWWW” sound like singles that Sophie produced for other artists. “Berlin Nightmare” and all the pure non-vocal electronic cuts are just 30 second loops played ad nauseam to fill in the length of a full song. All these are fine ideas that Sophie would’ve edited and fused together to make a product that would’ve been stronger than the sum of its parts. It’s hard to parse how finished any of these cuts were, or which ones would’ve simply been used as DJ set fodder. It’s as if you gave an AI program Sophie’s drafts and asked it to rearrange them into an album, there is an uncanny non-cohesion. There is certainly heart here and flashes of brilliance, but without her there to finalize any of it, there can be no themes, and therefore, no album.
A Positive Way Forward
At the end of the day, my “take” is not to blame Sophie’s family or collaborators for this album not being all that. That’s why I keep repeating the term “non-starter”, because as angry as I am with how this was handled, none of that is to be directed towards any of these people. Not Ben, not her sister, not BC Kingdom, nobody. They tried to do an impossible task and failed, and that’s ok. We’re all human beings striving to do the right thing, and sometimes that’s hard. Honoring a person’s wishes after they pass can sadly feel like a non-starter if their wishes aren’t outlined. I’m 28 years old, I and probably 95% of my generation don’t have wills written up. Sophie didn’t, many famous, prominent young people don’t either. Tyler, The Creator is the only dude around my age that I’ve heard publicly say something like “don’t make posthumous albums from my files”.
Anyway, if you enjoyed the record I don’t take anything away from you. Enjoy it! Honor her memory in whatever way you find appropriate and continue to spread her wonderful message of self-improvement, love and acceptance. I don’t really think this record or any record will do her justice, and that’s okay. We have a wonderful body of work that exists and troves of rares on YouTube. Sophie Forever.