SOPHIE - SOPHIE Review
SOPHIE’s posthumous album delivers haunting futurism and emotional depth.
‘Basically, the most fun I can have is being with a synthesiser with my brother, smoke some weed and literally just go deep into sound’. The significance of SOPHIE in pop music today cannot be denied. Her production was distinctive and influential, expanding outside of the hyper pop bracket to work with musicians like Vince Staples to Lady Gaga, showing her sensibilities to other genres outside of hyper pop, and helping those artists subvert their sound at the same time.
Posthumous albums are always a difficult listen. The extent to what the recently passed artist had on the album, however formed it is, an aspect of something being lost is always present. With SOPHIE’s brother Benny Long, alongside other collaborators, taking on the baton to round out her vision, ’SOPHIE’ is an album that still carries that futurism and quirkiness we all came to love her for.
This is not ‘Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides’ part two. A different vision takes hold instead, a darker, grimier sound that steps away from the upbeat sugary pop. ‘The Dome’s Protection’ is hypnotic across its entire seven minutes, with a haunting and disassociated spoken word delivered by Nina Kreviz. ‘Humans have a way of abstract thinking’, and ‘Human consciousness falls like stream’ are just a couple of revelations about the state of humanity alongside other stated under these large twinkling swells and darker synths makes for a track that fits the world SOPHIE built through her musical outputs.
‘Reason Why’ is a soft pop club music welcoming back Kim Petras and BC Kingdom, beginning the start of a three-track run for the latter artist. ‘Do you Wanna Be Alive’ is distinctive for its Punchy drums and vocalist Big sister’s distorted vocals. This feels like familiar territory in a good way in its strange absurdisms (car screeches, warping bubbly synth sounds) that are a hallmark of SOPHIE’s production. It fuses perfectly with the transition into ‘Elegance’ but fades and exists rather than builds and excite. A muted bass rings through the track ‘One more time’, which later inhabits the sound of Euro Pop with its piano line. ‘Always and Forever’ is an emotional with the hindsight of Sophie’s passing, a beautiful ode (intentional or not) to the legacy of SOPHIE with Hannah Diamond on vocals, two princesses of the hyper pop genre coming together for the last time. Everything's moving away/Farther and farther away/Tracing a light in the sky/Tell me if you see it too.
SOPHIE’s extensive list of collaborators shows the ambition and range Sophie wanted to deliver on the album, stepping away from her previous album’s scape to envelop and shift expectations. A slightly washed out/muted mix is jarring and doesn’t do justice in highlighting all the eccentric minor moments in the production that act as SOPHIE’s signature. Regardless, what Benny and Sophie’s collaborators have managed to make from what was left calls back to all the reasons why SOPHIE was so special as an artist, leaving us with an album that carries the energy and production she pioneered, whilst leaving us wanting a little bit more.