SOPHIE and Pop Music, Forever and Always
SOPHIE’s innovative releases and collaborations marked pop music forever. Her first studio album, Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, defied labels and her production for pop royalty such as Charli XCX and Madonna showed the genre’s radical queer potential. SOPHIE’s legacy is truly forever and always.
Written by Zachary Bolash
The year 2013 stands as a far cry from 2024. Despite the general public’s changing attitude toward LGBTQ+ people thanks to decades of grassroots activism, queerphobia still ran rampant in the 2010s, even in refuges like music. Anti-queer and trans sentiments dominated this period, with some notable moments including Snoop Dogg’s claim that Frank Ocean couldn’t rap because of his sexuality and Lady Gaga’s iconic dismissal of a transphobic question from Anderson Cooper. Queer and trans people, however, have always marched with the inevitable beat of progress to express themselves fully and vulnerably, and among the most impactful of these artists was SOPHIE.
Her 2013 single, "Nothing More to Say," introduced listeners to her forward-thinking sound. Its two tracks, "Eeehhh" and "Nothing More to Say," approached house music with a futuristic angle. The former played with the volatile reactants of deep percussion and bubbly melodies, an impossible combination handled masterfully. On "Nothing More to Say," chiming synthesizers quickly overtake punchy kick percussion from the track’s beginning. SOPHIE later introduces vocal samples of a feminine, sultry croon and a stark, near booming, masculine shout by the song's midpoint. These approaches to house music break away from its ambient effect at clubs. The producer textured "Nothing More to Say" with a medley of different samples and experimental sonic choices. From the beginning of her career, she showed gall, an artistic sensibility earning her the attention of notable musicians like Madonna, which propelled her into the producer pantheon.
Like the reactive power of “Nothing More to Say,” SOPHIE sharpened her collaborators' experimental edge. After reaching producer stardom with her early solo work, SOPHIE began to collaborate with Charli XCX. The Essex singer, a commercial pop star, explored cutting-edge frontiers with their notorious collaboration, “Track 10.” The song divides itself into two parts: an electronic, chirping overture, then an airy pop song. Critics panned the collaboration for its supposedly provocative nature that lacked musical depth. But in reality, “Track 10” protested pop prudishness, concerning itself with art and wholly unconcerning itself with charts. Ultimately, its unorthodox brilliance triumphed over the initial lukewarm reception.
Aside from Charli XCX, SOPHIE affiliated herself with London producer A.G. Cook’s experimental collective, PC Music. In the mid-2010s, SOPHIE collaborated with Cook to produce the conceptual QT project, which exemplified the collective’s philosophy of creating pointedly unserious art.
QT arrived from nowhere — the project’s sole single, “Hey QT,” debuted at a Los Angeles Boiler Room set in 2014. Sonically, the track stands as an intermediary point for SOPHIE, a moment where she floated between the staccato rhythms of house music and the lyrical freedoms of pop. In a way, “Hey QT” synthesizes the sharp percussion of “Eeehhh” and the artificially pitched vocals of "Track 10.” Listeners can hear the producer on an acidic bassline that underpins QT’s nauseatingly high vocals as she lusts over her crush: “I feel your hands on my body / Every time you think of me.” While those are indeed sweet lyrics, the accompanying music video undercuts the song’s romanticism, as it unapologetically advertises a fictitious soda brand. Listeners may interpret the single as a demonstration of intimacy dilemmas in a hyper-capitalist world. Equal parts bubbly and sharp, “Hey QT” showed that pop music is equally capable of societal critique as genres like punk and conscious hip-hop are.
SOPHIE’s early career was inherently self-effacing. Though a mastermind behind influential collaborations, artists, and PC Music’s proto-hyperpop sound, SOPHIE never seemed to foreground herself. Her artistic invisibility ended with her 2018 debut album, Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, a seminal project that transcends genre. The album pivots from a booming industrial sound to the croons of an electronic pop star across three standout tracks: "Faceshopping," "Immaterial," and "It’s Ok To Cry."
As the opening track on the record, “It’s Okay To Cry” sounds palliative in nature. The song’s instrumentals feature repetitive synth arpeggios intermittently disturbed with deep, percussive blasts. The song served as the thesis of Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, calling for listeners to shed the burdensome weight of emotions with its refrain, “It’s okay to cry.” The track proved invaluable to the producer. In the song’s accompanying music video, SOPHIE claimed what she had formerly denied herself: recognition. The pop icon had previously obscured herself behind her collaborators and hidden her image in interviews, prompting journalists and even contemporaries like Grimes to admonish her for appropriating femininity as a supposed man. In the single’s cover art and music video, however, SOPHIE proved her critics’ assumptions wrong by intimately revealing her face and body, marking the first time she revealed her identity in any promotional material. The music video for “It’s Okay To Cry” portrays SOPHIE in the way that she perceived herself regardless of others’ preconceived ideas, serving as her public coming-out and symbolizing her journey toward trans self-acceptance.
In contrast to the tenderness of “It’s Okay to Cry,” “Faceshopping” machete slashes society’s insipid obsession with beauty. The song’s electric percussion buoys strange and meditative lyrics that function as beauty-related items or procedures: “Hydroponic skin / Chemical release … Plastic surgery.” Most fundamentally, the song fuses deeply intricate sounds with satirical lyricism, a sonic conveyance of beauty standards’ dark underbelly. But within “Faceshopping,” there also exists a rage. SOPHIE’s critique of beauty standards indirectly pierces at the heart of trans people’s struggles. Trans folks often experience societal pressures to live up to dauntingly high beauty standards in order to pass as cisgender. To some trans people, the world of beauty appears as a cruel exercise in gender conformity.
Where “Faceshopping” sought to clearly demonstrate beauty’s perils, “Immaterial” finds comfort in its own ambiguity. The latter’s instrumental pulse stays consistent throughout the song, accompanied by call-and-response lyrics about “Immaterial girls / Immaterial boys.” The song harkens back to PC Music’s violent happiness by embodying an unbridled sense of joy. The song’s importance, however, lies in its impact. SOPHIE’s declarations of immateriality embrace the liberatory feeling of gender euphoria and the comfort of gender fluidity, cementing the song’s status as a modern-day trans anthem.
Simply put, SOPHIE played a sonic god on her debut record. While most producers draw upon soundboards and samples, the visionary created her signature bassy and bubblegum sounds from scratch by experimenting with the Elektron Monomachine. In an interview with Elektronauts, SOPHIE explained that her music does not mimic traditional instruments like kick drums or claps do. The Monomachine created SOPHIE's dynamic soundscape, which focused on transposing raw materials, such as plastic and latex, into exciting sounds. She perfectly narrowed and honed her vision with the Monomachine’s mere six channels. No one had heard her resulting synthesis of sounds before. In light of her death in 2021, many artists cited her unique sound as a major influence on today’s pop and experimental scenes.
The door to pop music welcomes anyone. Pop embraces every edge and angle in music, and it sonically sponges various influences to create a stylistic melting pot of sound. As such, transgressive and experimental acts like SOPHIE will always lie at the heart of pop’s forward-thinking nature. The producer dared to shatter music industry standards, build them back up, and shatter them again.
In February 2021, SOPHIE’s loss devastated her confidantes, music lovers, and queer people alike. She marked the lives of her collaborators, who regarded her as a “visionary,” “icon,” and, perhaps most beautifully from Jack Antonoff, “an artist who truly had the ideas first and the guts to put it out there.” SOPHIE precisely executed her artistic vision and created a new sonic ecosystem with the Elektron Monomachine. She, perhaps most importantly, liberated and affirmed her queer and trans audiences, reminding listeners of their immaterialism and, most importantly, that “it’s okay to cry.”