Sophie’s Closing Album Is a Reminder of Her Irreplaceable Brilliance

How do you honor the legacy of an artist as brilliantly difficult as Sophie? In her lifetime, the Scottish producer rewired pop music by prioritizing the seek for “the loudest, brightest factor” above all else. Her legendary run of hard-edged membership singles within the early 2010s, adopted by her impossibly smooth work with acts like Charli XCX and Vince Staples, set a benchmark that the remainder of the world remains to be catching as much as. She was the form of producer who would stroll out of a studio session if a collaborator acquired too sentimental. Then she fried our circuits once more by pairing pummeling noise with uncooked emotion on her 2018 full-length debut. For those who ever had any expectations about her, she took glee in torching them.

Now, almost 4 years after her unintentional demise at 34, Sophie’s brother has stepped as much as full her second album, working with the near-finished music and observe sequence she left behind. Like different posthumous releases by trailblazers from Jimi Hendrix to J Dilla, this one is haunted by unanswerable questions. We are able to’t know what sort of mind-melting beats Sophie would have been developing a decade after “Lemonade,” or what sort of escapes she would have imagined from this 12 months’s harsh realities. We’ll must be content material with a snapshot of the place she was heading when her story was minimize tragically brief.

Sophie opens like a sci-fi movie, with the skin-crawling synth creep of “Intro (The Full Horror).” From there it’s a fast journey to the psychedelic lure of “RAWWWWWW,” the place visitor vocalist Jozzy’s vocals twist and stretch like metallic taffy over jazzy keys. The album slows down for spoken-word interludes that alternately resemble chilly goals (“The Dome’s Safety,” that includes Siberian producer Nina Kraviz) or hectic nightmares (“Plunging Asymptote,” that includes avant-garde polymath Juliana Huxtable). 

These opening tracks are heady, confrontational stuff, and so they’ll absolutely slay for the primary DJ who’s courageous sufficient to drop any of them in an IRL set. However Sophie by no means ignored the liberatory energy of pop music pushed to its limits, and this album works even higher when it remembers that. “Reside in My Fact” (that includes L.A. musicians BC Kingdom and Liz) is chrome-coated sweet; “Exhilarate” (that includes Rihanna collaborator Bibi Bourelly) is a gorgeously unreal High 40 hit in ready.

Talking of pop in 2024, Sophie’s standing as a serious affect couldn’t be clearer. Charli XCX, the artist who most memorably matched Sophie’s frequency on collaborations like 2016’s “Vroom Vroom,” is ascendant eventually, with an album that attracts a lot of its emotional gravity from a track devoted to her reminiscence. Different acts are doing xerox-of-a-xerox impressions of Sophie beats, or catching flak for well-intentioned tributes to her. It’s exhausting accountable anybody right here (although that hasn’t stopped the web’s harshest critics). The world solely will get an artist like Sophie as soon as in a really lengthy whereas, and it’s pure for the reverberations of her work to maintain echoing.

Sophie incorporates hints of grief in songs like “All the time and Without end,” sung by her early PC Music comrade Hannah Diamond. A fragile late-night ballad, it may need been written as a love track, nevertheless it feels now like a heartbreaking meditation on absence. Largely, although, that is an album that’s extra fascinated by shifting at hyperspeed towards the long run than mourning the previous. The tracklist peaks with the hammering membership beats of “Gallop” (that includes Evita Manji) and “Magnificence” (that includes Popstar) — classic Sophie bangers, the place each snare hit and synth patch feels lab-designed to disorient your senses and maximize your pleasure. One final time, she’s set a brand new bar for different musicians to leap over in the event that they dare.