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When the producer Sophie died at 34 in 2021 after an unintended fall, it felt like a singular loss, in addition to the top of a nascent period in digital music. The revolutionary Scottish artist, who labored with Charli XCX, Vince Staples and Madonna, was a linchpin of the U.Okay.’s experimental scene within the 2010s and advocated for a radical reframing of the best way creators and listeners take into consideration music. “The language of digital music shouldn’t nonetheless be referencing out of date devices like kick drum or clap. No one’s kicking or clapping,” she mentioned in 2014. “It makes extra sense in my thoughts to discard these concepts of polyphony and conventional roles of instrumentation.”
Sophie offered a brand new vernacular, in addition to nice inspiration, for a era of acolytes, however her personal physique of labor was comparatively small and she or he not often spoke to the press, making it arduous to think about the place one in all pop futurism’s main lights might have gone subsequent. While many artists, such because the avant-garde pop duo 100 gecs and the German experimental musician Lyra Pramuk, have drawn clear inspiration from Sophie, few have captured the perilous, cutting-edge newness of her work, which reinterpreted pop music codes in disorienting, bodily, textural methods.
On “Lemonade,” an early calling card, she appeared to craft melody out of the sounds of popping bubbles and hissing fuel canisters; “Faceshopping” turns concepts of constructed digital identification into what seems like a building web site, whirring with the sounds of tearing metallic and heavy equipment. Sophie felt that music ought to be a tactile, unpredictable expertise — she memorably mentioned a track ought to really feel like a roller-coaster experience, ending with the listener shopping for a key ring — however numerous makes an attempt to reference the “Sophie sound,” like Kim Petras’s 2023 observe “Brrr,” scale back the producer’s philosophy to an aesthetic of bulbous bass and scraping synths whereas nonetheless becoming standard pop types.
Four current songs by Charli XCX, A.G. Cook, Caroline Polachek and St. Vincent appear to counsel that one of the simplest ways to pay tribute to a contemporary titan is to not emulate her in any respect, however to reinterpret strands of her DNA in hope of alluding to a much bigger image. These tracks reckon with Sophie’s legacy in emotional, reasonably than technical, methods, acknowledging the humanity inside a determine who is commonly remembered in flattening, counterintuitively inflexible portraits.
The most trenchant of those songs is “So I,” the wounded core of Charli’s unstable, clubby new file, “Brat.” Over shuddering laser-beam synths — a nod to her previous work with Sophie on data like “Vroom Vroom” and “Number 1 Angel” — Charli sings about regretting placing distance between herself and Sophie, whose expertise awed her, whereas she was alive. The track is nakedly weak, virtually energy ballad-esque in the best way it builds, resembling one in all Sophie’s best-known tracks: “It’s OK to Cry,” the track with which she got here out as transgender and revealed her face to the general public for the primary time. Charli makes the hyperlink specific on the observe’s refrain: “I do know you all the time mentioned ‘It’s OK to cry’/So I do know I can cry.”
Like Charli, Cook was one in all Sophie’s closest collaborators; he has written at size about how a lot his artistry and musicianship was influenced by her concepts about manufacturing and artifice, and the pair have been usually positioned because the main forces of what’s now generally known as hyperpop. “Without,” a track paying tribute to Sophie from his current triple-LP “Britpop,” sounds little like something the pair made collectively — it’s a uncooked electrical guitar-and-vocals track that recollects the hushed depth of Midwest emo (“I’m bored with by no means letting go,” he sings, “I’m residing with/Without your wit/An vacancy”). Toward the track’s finish, he interpolates Sophie’s breakthrough single, “Bipp,” specializing in the anthemic chant at its core: “I could make you are feeling higher/If you let me.” Cook makes use of it as a pure expression of feeling and want, channeling the deep heat working by a lot of Sophie’s work.
Both of those songs sketch out a picture of Sophie not simply as a superproducer, however as somebody whose distinctly emotional aspect — one which was realized most totally on her sole album, “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” (2017) — was as key to her music because the sharpened, technical one. Polachek, one other buddy and collaborator of Sophie’s, zeros in on one other side of her music: her embodiment of the twisted pop star, refracting components of diva worship and spectacle into one thing unusual and magnetic.
“I Believe,” a track from Polachek’s 2023 album “Desire, I Want to Turn Into You,” is implicitly addressed to Sophie (“I imagine we’ll get one other day collectively”) and explicitly addresses the circumstances of her dying. It welds collectively signifiers of ’80s and ’90s pop — chintzy, euphoric synth stabs; a hypnotic two-step beat — and makes use of them as padding for Polachek’s hovering voice. While she is often a managed singer, Polachek unleashes an unrestricted, decorative vocal on “I Believe”; her contortions and wails really feel like a homage to Sophie’s fondness for chopping and distending the voice into items that might function spine for complete tracks.
“I Believe,” whereas principally well-received, has additionally drawn ire from some followers for a gap line — “Look over the sting, however not too far” — that references Sophie’s dying (the producer slipped whereas observing a full moon). St. Vincent pushed additional in her personal current Sophie tribute, “Sweetest Fruit,” which begins with a verse that imagines Sophie’s remaining moments: “One fallacious stair/Took her right down to the depths/But for a minute, what a view.”
St. Vincent additionally sings the lyrics “My Sophie,” laying declare to an artist she didn’t know personally; the backlash was swift. But Clark’s invocation can also be an indication of her admiration for an artist whose music was fearless and risk-taking, who understood that “the sweetest fruit is on the limb.” (It additionally suits right into a rising canon of St. Vincent songs about queer individuals looking for to search out methods of residing exterior conventional buildings.)
The track itself, a chunk of sugary art-rock, sounds nothing like something Sophie would produce. But shallow emulation of the producer’s “sound” looks like extra of a pitfall than merely sticking in your individual lane and making an attempt to seize the hanging human attraction of her music and her stardom. “Sweetest Fruit,” like all these songs, understands innately that it was Sophie’s angle that was strongest — not the pots-and-pans clatter of her synths, however the concept, reasonably than proceed to fall down a black gap of retro-mania, music might, and would, someday transfer right into a bolder and braver future.
