SOPHIE - SOPHIE
Can the final posthumous release from the late Scottish producer live up to its long awaited hype?
Released on September 25th, 2024 by close family, SOPHIE is the second album from music producer SOPHIE, and is unfortunately both a final release and a posthumous one. The album is a bit over an hour and features contributions from many of the artist’s friends, creating a sort of bittersweet tone while journeying through the energetic album and its interesting textures and stories.
This album was my first genuine foray into electronic music, and it gave me a lot of layers and textures I wasn’t fully used to. It begins with “Intro (The Full Horror)”, and provides a sort of gentle, ambient cruise into the heart of the music. The following few tracks, namely “Rawwwwww”, were not something I enjoyed nearly as much as the opening track. I quite like the instrumentals on the aforementioned track, with disorienting bass tones that play with the effect-heavy vocals provided by Jozzy very well, but I found my mind wandering after only the second repeat of the vocal line.
That trait carries into following tracks “Plunging Asymptote” and “Dome’s Protection”, which is unfortunate considering how much I enjoy the instrumentals on the prior. I found Juliana Huxtable’s contributions to the track only distracted me from the jagged electronics, and it felt more like a track that had vocals forced into it as opposed to a track made with them in mind. Overall, on re-listens, I find the second and fourth track to be almost immediate skips, while “Plunging Asymptote” is just a disappointing track that almost hits the mark for me”.
I think that the repeated nature of many of the songs works better elsewhere, namely the vocal sample on “Reason Why”. It features some almost space-like synths in the first portion, and the first verse introduces some thumping bass that I really enjoy. The different vocalists Kim Petras and BC Kingdom mesh very nicely together, which carries into the next track nicely due to BC Kingdom’s reappearance. I found “Live My Truth” a lot less interesting than the previous track, especially since they both utilize a frequent, high pitched vocal sample with the same singer. I think on a project with a single vocalist it would be less notable, but a smorgasbord of different vocal textures makes a back-to-back vocal appearance feel repetitive already. Following this is another LIZ and BC Kingdom song in “Why Lies”, and it’s largely the same feelings and criticisms besides this being the most interesting repeated vocal sample of the trio of works.
Every time I listened to the album, I felt myself looking forward to the track “Elegance”, simply due to how the overly noisy and crunchy qualities dance with the snappy drum sounds. The staccato lead melody is one I found stuck in my head for days after the first listen, and the sparse vocal contributions from Popstar on this one made the music feel as though it had more room to breathe despite it being such a weighty, almost all-encompassing instrumental. I will say the last minute or so of the track felt quite awkward, but it’s more than made up for by Berlin Nightmare and Evita Manji, which is another personal favorite track.
The lead melody and simple vocals once again allow the music to feel open yet full, because this album is at its strongest when the instrumentals are growly and at the forefront. This is yet again shown by Gallop, which feels like a more compact and spacious format of what this chunk of the album offers to a listener like myself.
With a transition of “One More Time” into the final few tracks, I feel the length of the album finally begins to be truly apparent. “One More Time” alongside “Always and Forever” would’ve been a phenomenal closer, and I feel like splitting them up with “Exhilarate” was an awkward choice with a song I already am not super fond of. I found vocalist Bibi Bourelly’s harmonies later in the song to be pretty cool, but the song would’ve felt much more at home in the more vocal-oriented first half of the album.
Following the tonally odd “Exhilarate” is “Always and Forever”, which is far and away the best track with a focus on vocals. I felt like Hannah Diamond’s performance alongside the usage of vocal effects created a very cool sensation that feels bittersweet but oddly uplifting at the same time. The track doesn’t overstay its welcome, and the instrumentals have a sort of weightless movement to them, ensuring the song feels like it is moving at a good pace while also feeling like it is the familiar qualities throughout the album, only now unfurled and a bit warmer.
I feel the album would’ve felt complete ending there, but it is followed by “My Forever” with Cecile Believe, which feels plodding and uninteresting until the synthetic string sounds come in with the pre-chorus and chorus. I think this song could fit nicely somewhere in the ending if it focused on the tones and timbre of the dreamlike, almost spacey chorus, which it delivers after the second chorus to amazing effect. The final song “Love Me Off Earth” is an okay conclusion, but I think it would’ve been better suited earlier in the album alongside “Exhilarate”, though I admittedly like this song much more than its poorly placed cohort. The disorienting twinkling sounds before the return of the sounds in the intro are very nice, and the winding samples and sounds following that are the highlight of the track simply due to how off putting they were when I first listened.
Overall, I think this album is alright. It is plagued by the awkward arrangements of tracks and I find myself gravitating towards any song with a focus on instrumentals, but I didn’t find many songs I actively disliked as a whole on the 16 song tracklist. While I’m not familiar with much of SOPHIE’s work, I’ve heard her self-titled album be called oddly safe compared to her other work, and this might be my gateway into exploring her unfortunately brief discography.