Review: “SOPHIE” sends off the titular legend with mixed results
Score: ★★★½
Top Track: “Always and Forever”
“SOPHIE” is the second album and posthumous album of groundbreaking Scottish producer SOPHIE, who, throughout her releases as a solo artist and producer, predicted and mapped out where pop music could go. SOPHIE’s sound experimented with genre, voice modulation and the sounds of the digital and everyday.
Her second album, “SOPHIE”, designed to be a pop album, was almost complete when SOPHIE tragically passed in 2021. Since then, SOPHIE’s brother Benny Long has worked with various collaborators to finish and release the work.
The album opens with “Intro (The Full Horror)”, a gloomy and dreamy dark soundscape with gently rolling crescendos that fade back into silence throughout the song's four and a half minute run. The intro lulls the listener in an almost meditative-fashion before heavy beat drops begin “Rawwwwww”, reminding us that this is a SOPHIE album; We will be thrown off and surprised in countless different ways.
“SOPHIE” moves in sections, the 16 tracks split up seemingly into groups of four. The first four songs, “Intro”, “Rawwwwww”, “Plunging Asymptote”, and “The Dome’s Protection”, are some of the most experimental of the album.
“Plunging Asymptote” (feat. Juliana Hoxoble) has spiraling, cascading synth and drum sounds with the words “plunging asymptote against a white noise more tortuous than silence" spoken repeatedly. Unfortunately, “Plunging Asymptote” sounds like it was created by someone who just learned how to use a mixer.
Likewise, “Dome Protection” (feats. Nina Kraviz) includes spoken words which gesture towards questions of reality, the digital world and imagination. The words play over the same style of dark soundscape that opens the album. The effect is sinister, while seemingly promising safety (“You are entering the dome’s protection once again”).
The next three tracks, “Reason Why” (feat. Kim Petras and BC Kingdom), “Live In My Truth” (feat. BC Kingdom and LIZ) and “Why Lies” (BC Kingdom and LIZ), transition towards a more mainstream sound in comparison to the preceding songs. The standout song of this section from SOPHIE is “Live In My Truth”, which is easily readable as a queer pop dance anthem. However,“Reason Why” and “Why Lies” fall flat compared to it, lacking uniqueness in their production, beat, lyrics and sound.
“Do You Wanna Be Alive” (feat. BIG SISTER) propels the album into a live DJ house-beat style with features from Evita Manji and Popstar on songs “Elegance”, “Berlin Nightmare”, “Gallop” and “One More Time”. The songs in this section are inspired by Berlin club culture and melt together seamlessly, with easy transitions, as the beat speeds up, changes, turns upside down and moves forward.
The final three songs of the album, “Always and Forever” (feat. Hannah Diamond), “My Forever” (feat. Ceclie Believe), and “Love Me Off Earth” (feat. Doss), feel inseparable from the context of the album and SOPHIE’s passing. “Always and Forever” and “My Forever” include softer echoey voices and lyrics that speak to grief.
The album’s final track “Love Me Off Earth” is more upbeat in terms of sound, but the idea of “Off Earth” spoken by a modulated robotic voice, speaks both to the sci-fi world created by the album and the legacy of SOPHIE, all that she has contributed and left behind for listeners, fans, creatives, musicians and producers.
The album’s structure detracts from its experience t. By putting the songs so definitively into sections, the album becomes disconnected and the listener may divide their experience, comparing songs within sections rather than across. The album intends to take the listener on a journey about the possibilities for experimental pop and the future of pop, but the sectional division presents an overly organized, neat and disjointed way.
As the album “SOPHIE” wraps up, you can feel the hole the artist SOPHIE has left – it reverberates. It’s challenging to tell where SOPHIE ends and begins on various tracks, and we can only imagine how the album may have been had she been here to complete it herself.
It is not the fault of the producers, but rather the circumstances, that there is a lack of authenticity compared to SOPHIE’s previous album, the highly-acclaimed “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Sides”. We never hear SOPHIE’s voice and there is nothing we can do about that.
For an album with an impossible task, it does a solid job of paying tribute to SOPHIE. “SOPHIE” positions the listener to look forward to the future of pop, asking how future artists can transform it – just like SOPHIE once did.
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