How do you honor the legacy of an artist as brilliantly challenging as Sophie? In her lifetime, the Scottish producer rewired pop music by prioritizing the search for “the loudest, brightest thing” above all else. Her legendary run of hard-edged club singles in the early 2010s, followed by her impossibly sleek work with acts like Charli XCX and Vince Staples, set a benchmark that the rest of the world is still catching up to. She was the kind of producer who would walk out of a studio session if a collaborator got too sentimental. Then she fried our circuits all over again by pairing pummeling noise with raw emotion on her 2018 full-length debut. If you ever had any expectations about her, she took glee in torching them.
Now, nearly four years after her accidental death at 34, Sophie’s brother has stepped up to complete her second album, working with the near-finished music and track sequence she left behind. Like other posthumous releases by trailblazers from Jimi Hendrix to J Dilla, this one is haunted by unanswerable questions. We can’t know what kind of mind-melting beats Sophie would have been constructing a decade after “Lemonade,” or what kind of escapes she would have imagined from this year’s harsh realities. We’ll have to be content with a snapshot of where she was heading when her story was cut tragically short.
Sophie opens like a sci-fi film, with the skin-crawling synth creep of “Intro (The Full Horror).” From there it’s a quick trip to the psychedelic trap of “RAWWWWWW,” where guest 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 dreams (“The Dome’s Protection,” featuring Siberian producer Nina Kraviz) or hectic nightmares (“Plunging Asymptote,” featuring avant-garde polymath Juliana Huxtable).
These opening tracks are heady, confrontational stuff, and they’ll surely slay for the first DJ who’s brave enough to drop any of them in an IRL set. But Sophie never ignored the liberatory power of pop music pushed to its limits, and this album works even better when it remembers that. “Live in My Truth” (featuring L.A. musicians BC Kingdom and Liz) is chrome-coated candy; “Exhilarate” (featuring Rihanna collaborator Bibi Bourelly) is a gorgeously unreal Top 40 hit in waiting.
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Speaking of pop in 2024, Sophie’s status as a major influence couldn’t be clearer. Charli XCX, the artist who most memorably matched Sophie’s frequency on collaborations like 2016’s “Vroom Vroom,” is ascendant at last, with an album that draws much of its emotional gravity from a song dedicated to her memory. Other acts are doing xerox-of-a-xerox impressions of Sophie beats, or catching flak for well-intentioned tributes to her. It’s hard to blame anyone here (though that hasn’t stopped the internet’s harshest critics). The world only gets an artist like Sophie once in a very long while, and it’s natural for the reverberations of her work to keep echoing.
Sophie contains hints of grief in songs like “Always and Forever,” sung by her early PC Music comrade Hannah Diamond. A delicate late-night ballad, it might have been written as a love song, but it feels now like a heartbreaking meditation on absence. Mostly, though, this is an album that’s more interested in moving at hyperspeed toward the future than mourning the past. The tracklist peaks with the hammering club beats of “Gallop” (featuring Evita Manji) and “Elegance” (featuring Popstar) — vintage Sophie bangers, where every snare hit and synth patch feels lab-designed to disorient your senses and maximize your pleasure. One last time, she’s set a new bar for other musicians to leap over if they dare.
