On Sophie’s Posthumous Album, a Remaining Disappearing Act

There was nothing ephemeral or ambiguous about her impact on digital music, nevertheless. There’s digital music earlier than Sophie and digital music after Sophie: She helped to outline Charli XCX, and the hyperpop sound extra broadly, earlier than happening to work with Staples, Prepare dinner, Kim Petras, Arca, Girl Gaga, and FKA Twigs. (On her current album Brat, Charli cannily referred to as the late producer each “a hero and a human.”)

The posthumous report Sophie, out on September 27, displays that layered legacy. The album was practically full when Sophie died from a tragic fall in January 2021; the tracklist was set and the foundations for the songs have been properly underway. (Sophie’s brother and sister, Benny and Emily Lengthy, ended up ending the report over the past three years.) The ultimate product features a few beforehand launched recordings, however not like her first album, on which Sophie typically manipulated her personal voice, this one options nearly completely exterior voices: there are appearances from Petras, Julianna Huxtable, Nina Kraviz, Liz, Bibi Bourelly, Hannah Diamond, Doss, and extra. The frenetic assortment doesn’t all the time cohere the best way her conceptual debut did, however Sophie left an indelible mark on the whole lot she touched.

Sophie’s pop and experimental inclinations battle it out on the brand new report as she tracks by means of lure, spoken-word poems, dirty hardcore beats, and extra sparkly, easy pop melodies with glimmering manufacturing. Dense lyrics about transhumanism and the character of the universe over ethereal synths recur on a number of songs, together with the Juliana Huxtable collab “Plunging Asymptote” and the sweeping, seven-minute “The Dome’s Safety” with Nina Kraviz. Huge Sister sings about “translucent infinity” and “deviant mythology” on the gloopy, dripping stand-out monitor “Do U Wanna Be Alive?,” her perspective expertly matching Sophie’s wry, mechanical manufacturing. Sophie’s crunchy membership tracks dominate the latter half of the report: songs just like the hardcore “Class,” with Popstar, which morphs from one beat to a different; or the looping, rhythmic “Berlin Nightmare,” with Sophie’s associate Evita Manji. The dramatic keys of “One Extra Time” are damaged by the Bibi Bourelly collaboration “Exhilarate,” Bourelly’s voice gliding over a glitchy, barely off-kilter beat.

The ultimate three songs of Sophie could sound essentially the most acquainted to these finest acquainted along with her hottest collaborations, like “1, 2, 3 Dayz Up” with Kim Petras. The candy, transcendent “All the time and Perpetually” is a collaboration with Hannah Diamond of PC Music fame. Cecile Imagine, who typically wrote and carried out with Sophie, supplying vocals on tracks like “Immaterial” from Oil of Each Pearl’s Un-Insides, comes again to take level on a slowed-down model of “My Perpetually”—a music beforehand featured on Sophie’s unbelievable “Heav3n Suspended” livestream from 2020—with its shifting message about time and love. The album nearer, “Love Me Off Earth,” sung by Doss and co-written with Thora Siemsen and M Zavos-Costales, is likely one of the strongest songs of the bunch. “What’s it price to like me off earth?” Doss croons over the hyperpop monitor, filled with echoing synths, earlier than her voice turns into an instrument in Sophie’s palms. (“Initially, my songwriting course of was fueled by private heartbreak, which has taken on a brand new that means within the wake of her passing,” Siemsen tells me over e mail. “I don’t assume it’s somber musically, although. It’s cathartic to bounce to.”)