Certain young women wish to gain recognition, whereas others opt to maintain an aura of mystery. The Scottish-origin artist and producer Sophie resonated with those who chose to stay behind the controls despite weaving their own enchanting creations—and Sophie, her posthumous album, endeavors to balance these contrasting philosophies.
Renowned for her gritty, glitch-infused production style in her forceful music, Sophie nurtured a markedly private public persona, staying largely enigmatic outside her artistic moniker until her announcement as a transgender woman in 2017. She was both composer and curator of her own visual and musical identity; however, she exuded more than anything an ethereal alien uniqueness. During her time, Sophie produced one studio album—the highly regarded, Grammy-nominated Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides (2018)—and a mixtape, and both were heavily instrumental, with several tracks anchored by a singular phrase reiterated endlessly, stretched near linguistic breaking point until robotic chaos and distortion took the helm. Her initial releases, such as 2015’s “BIPP” and “Lemonade,” lingered in the air without clarity on their context or creator. (In 2021, Vince Staples recollected that numerous people conjectured Sophie was simply another venture by A.G. Cook.) The 2017 video for “It’s Okay to Cry”—introducing Sophie’s visage to most admirers for the first time—situated her against a dynamically changing environment of clouds, rainbows, and a star-speckled night sky, embracing a state of in-betweenness, while the exuberantly avant-garde video for “Faceshopping” from 2018 delighted in vivid transformations of her image. Harron Walker has earlier commented on the “dissociative” nature in Sophie’s compositions, illustrating how it encapsulates the experience of being concurrently present and absent, within the same physical form. Sophie tapped into a more celestial dimension, where forms weave in and out of perception amid the pulsating lights of the club.