Searching for SOPHIE
New music from SOPHIE is a gift. In remembering beloved artists, how do we make sure that their specificity doesn't get lost over time? And how can we protect their art while still respecting their humanity?
We don’t want to stop talking about SOPHIE. News of a posthumous album from the pioneering electronic artist revealed that before pressing play. How could we? SOPHIE’s influence is everywhere – in the work of her collaborators, in the tastes of the next generation, and in what gets played during sweaty basement club sets in Glasgow and across the world.
Her legend status grows more untouchable with each passing year. In the days after hearing about one final album to come, there was joy in being given a chance to talk about it with other people who cared. There was excitement, too, in hearing a new track premiered as BBC Radio 1’s Hottest Record. “She changed the view of music and how to approach it, totally boundaryless, nothing could ever hold SOPHIE back in her attempt to be unique and original,” said Jack Saunders introducing Reason Why, the album’s first single featuring Kim Petras and BC Kingdom.
It is effusive praise, but not wrong. SOPHIE’s music is held dearly by those who connect with it, from her many queer fans touched by her writing on an existential level, to those who are creatively energised by her rule-breaking approach to sound design.
But actually listening to this new music felt more complicated. As Saunders points out, her art felt like endless possibility. It made impossible textures tactile, and inner worlds reachable. When she passed away in 2021, it felt as if anything could come next. Solidifying that reality with new music creates a finality that could be hard to take.
Some fans have reacted to that feeling in uncomfortable ways, questioning the record’s creation and its intentions. It should be underlined that the album, simply titled SOPHIE, has clearly been a labour of love for her family and friends. Announcing the release, they said: “Sophie didn’t often speak publicly of her private life, preferring to put everything she wanted to articulate in her music. It feels only right to share with the world the music she hoped to release, in the belief that we can all connect with her in this, the form she loved most.”
As her long-term collaborator and studio manager, SOPHIE’s brother Benny Long has been key to the record’s release, as he was for her debut 2018 record, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. If anyone can be trusted with acting out her vision, it’s him.
Still, as a fan, there can be a level of defensiveness over your favourite artist’s legacy. Fans can drift into feeling misplaced ownership over it when there’s a chance that we could lose the depth and specificity of how an artist is remembered.
SOPHIE. Image: Charlotte Wales.
It’s in part understandable. SOPHIE had vision. Her songs could be messy, pristine, humorous and profound, often within a tight three minutes. You want that all to translate to any new listener, rather than being flattened by the most high-profile thing released about her. She only became widely discussed by some major news outlets and on mainstream platforms after her passing. A new record might be a gateway for some.
But in a rush to come to her honour, it’s possible to dismiss her humanity completely.
For one, bootlegged SOPHIE material has circulated for years online. One of the major fan reactions to the single Reason Why was to compare it to the leaked versions. To imply we know her intentions better than those around her would be misguided, especially when working with music sourced in dubious circumstances.
SOPHIE was an artist in constant flux. Her short but varied discography demonstrates a willingness to change direction and follow newness. It’s clear from one of her final interviews, a 2019 feature with DJ Mag, that her planned direction was to embrace a wider audience. “I want to normalise myself and my ideas,” she said. “I’m making music about connection, feeling good, it’s personable and down to earth: very simple themes are important to me right now. I needed music to serve that purpose, for the me now, and the me next.” When we question the light pop touch on some songs on SOPHIE, we forget she played with mass appeal just as much as she did the weird and the obscure.
Trying to capture SOPHIE the artist and Sophie the person is ephemeral, just as it is to hold onto the memory of anyone important when they pass. We’ve seen the music world wrestle with this in real time, in the many tributes that have been written about her. From the reactive and heartfelt snapshots, like Vince Staples’ memorable tweets shortly after her passing (“Sophie was different you ain’t never seen somebody in the studio smoking a cigarette in a leather bubble jacket just making beats not saying one word”), to the carefully penned essays, and the tribute songs made in the years since, there’s a whole spectrum of human reaction to loss.
It’s perhaps in the songs where we most see legacy and humanity in conversation. It’s not surprising that those who knew her made the most touching of these tributes. SOPHIE’s musical confidante, PC Music co-creator A. G. Cook wrote an aching and universal song about grief on Without. ‘I'm living with / An emptiness / Without your voice / Attached to it’, he sings. It could be about any loved one until he interpolates SOPHIE’s early smash BIPP in a half whisper, and reminds us all why we love her work.
Conversely, Caroline Polachek’s I Believe was dedicated to SOPHIE, and touches on the strength of her presence in the wake of her passing: ‘You're not alone / Under a sky of vultures / With all that could've been / You made it home / With silver string unbroken / Ain't that the sweetest gift?’ Here, she’s eternal. For all its poetry, the second-person perspective places her friend at the centre.
St. Vincent was less successful in her tribute, Sweetest Fruit, which romanticised the circumstances of SOPHIE’s death and felt oddly possessive for a song written about a person she had never met. ‘My Sophie climbed the roof / To get a better view of the moon, moon’, its opening lines go. In our own views of this new record, we should take it as a warning not to do our version of ‘My Sophie’.
The most knotted and vulnerable of these tributes comes from another frequent collaborator, Charli xcx, whose track So I is unafraid to mention that being close to such a headstrong person is not easy: ‘Wish I'd tried to pull you closer / You pushed me hard, made me focus / Your words, brutal, loving, truthful / I was petrified’, she sings. ‘You're a hero and a human’ goes the following line, legacy and humanity together. The song is more real for its complex dynamic.
For most of her career, SOPHIE was written about as the future of music, at least when the press caught up to what she was doing. It was something she played into in interviews. “The past isn’t sexy; the future is sexy,” she said when being asked about her early life when speaking to OfficeMagazine. This could have been a cheeky way of avoiding getting too deep, but it’s become an iconic line. “I just don’t have so much fun looking back... the future seems more real,” she had similarly noted.
But that doesn’t seem to be where her mind was when making a new record. Instead, she remembered formative experiences of raves, collecting memories with her brother. “We had these conversations that referenced really obscure psy-trance tapes that were so important to us,” she told DJ Mag. “We were able to touch on quite personal references, which I wouldn’t be able to share with anyone else. I’m allowing early rave stuff and those memories to be pretty influential for my new record.”
In that same interview she talked about trying to flirt for the first time when listening to Spice Girls’ 2 Become 1, while in an interview with The Face around the same time, she was nostalgic about summer holidays listening to Music Sounds Better With You. Our ideas of SOPHIE the futurist are in flux again.
Like all people, she could be anything she wanted, and our personal perception of her shouldn’t get in the way of allowing that to change, even now. This new record gives us the chance to find out more about her, and that’s a gift.
SOPHIE is released on 27 Sep via Transgressive and Future Classic