SOPHIE – SOPHIE

Transgressive and Future Classic

Of all the posthumous records that shouldn’t be posthumous. It’s a particular cruelty that SOPHIE left us because my feeling is that, while she was definitely ‘a name’ in certain circles, she’d never quite broken through. The first EPs and that first album (Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-insides) were blinders but all too little. I’ll take this record, but I’d rather she was still about.

It’s also an arse because I’m inclined to treat this as a development of her sound — which is to say, despite me wanting to think about it for its merits (which are many), it’s got an added layer of cruelty in that it shows a producer changing tack, developing her licks, and moving on (mostly) from the PC Music milieu. It’s still the same producer as Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-insides, but it’s got a distinctly darker vibe. And pushes in more directions. And a shitload more features.

Now with the features I’m not sure (because I don’t read press releases as a habit) is there’s a ‘feat…’ for every track because this is partially a reconstruction of demos or because SOPHIE intended this to be a guest-heavy record. If the latter, perhaps she was moving into one of those places where she’d ultimately end up reviving Madonna‘s career (as happens about once a decade) or lending some old tosh credibility. The features here are seemingly close to SOPHIE — her partner Evita Manji, Hannah Diamond (of PC Music fame) and other names from the international banger brigade.

Oh but the music? So there’s a definite musical narrative here — tracks interlaced with vocal-lead ambient-ish throbs (“The Dome’s Protection”, feat. Nina Kravitz), some sort of post-rave trap malevolence (“Rawwwwwww” feat. Jozzy). From the realm of ‘you’d expect that’ there’s “Reason Why” (feat. Kim Petras and BC Kingdom) and “Always and forever” (feat. Hannah Diamond) — both very much in the realm of ’90s-flavoured pop with 2020s-flavoured high-end production. Which is to brusque over PC Music, but you’ll get what I mean when you hear it.

Maaaaaybe the big tell on this record for where she was headed is the rap-pop realm — “Why Lies” (feat. BC Kingdom and LIZ) points to a kind of hypnogogic vision of girly ’90s pop meeting New Jack Swing. Absolutely begging for a Janet Jackson feature, therefore. For as in my forties there’s a lot to this record that’s provocatively ’90s-y’, but I’d hope for a youngling that’s just nonsense — it’s fucking excellent pop, by and large.

But — and again to stress that this is record of a developing artist — there’s stuff on here that’s not pop by most estimations. Absolutely standout track for me is “Berlin Nightmare” (feat. Evita Manji), which definitely has the sort of crisp attention-to-timbre that characterised (eg) “Ponyboy” but has the kind of Berlin techno flourish that’s stimmy as fuck and utterly needs to be played to bored-looking Germans with asymmetrical haircuts and expensively shit glasses. The other Manji feature on this record (“Gallop”) is somewhere close to Brazilian rhythms (or at least a bunch of rhythms at once) over techno four-to-the-floor. It too is an absolute belter.

It’s definitely already in the album of the year frame for me. At this point anything with hoover synths gets into that. It’s a cruel record, because it shows that SOPHIE was still innovating, still hugely attuned to textures, still tightly wound to treating pop as a first-class citizen in the world of dance music. Not a sad record so much as a chance to boof something grotty and dance like a cunt.

Shout out SOPHIE.

-Kev Nickells-