Every posthumous album carries the burden of being a career retrospective, a summation of a body of work that can no longer develop. Sometimes these records are like that on purpose, as an artist’s estate curates their unreleased work into a eulogy. Other times, it's unintentional: The artist left a fully-formed concept behind, and collaborators must somehow make the most of an unhappy accident. Sophie, the first and likely only posthumous album by the late Scottish producer (though future individual singles or even longer EPs are basically guaranteed), is very much the latter sort of record. That probably explains why it's been so divisive among critics and fans – understandably so, but also undeservingly.
Sophie was mostly finished when Sophie died suddenly in 2021, and most of it had been premiered during live sets or online livestreams during the past several years and preserved online by the producer's reverent fanbase. Sophie's brother Benny Long was left to add the finishing touches, and the discourse around the album – frustratingly, to everyone involved – has been about how extensive those finishing touches were. When Sophie and Long considered the album unfinished, according to all accounts, they were thinking like technicians. Most of the changes were the kind of mundane tweaks that happen during the final stretch of an album's release. Maybe a song had a scratch vocal and the re-recording session hadn't been scheduled. Maybe a song was recorded during the 2010s and the audio plugin got lost. Maybe there were contractual issues – addressing the grave allegations of choosing the wrong songs, Long told Paper that every track remaining in the proverbial Sophie vault would "need its own careful consideration" and emphasized the many more collaborators Sophie had compared to her 2018 official debut album Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides. It's not hard to read between the lines there.
The backlash, though, is coming from fans who feel that Sophie is a conceptually unfinished album: fundamentally different in track choice and theme than some other, ideal release. While "feel" is very much the appropriate word for this kind of backseat sequencing, the fans aren't wrong exactly; there's a lot of information out there about Sophie’s evolution over the years, which was apparently substantial. While Sophie had a vault of unreleased tracks rivaling her protege Charli XCX in breadth, a few of them were mainstays in her live sets and clear consensus favorites: "Take Me To Dubai," "Burn Rubber," "Transnation." None of them appear on this album, which rankled fans – the latter in particular was long rumored to be the title track, and Long confirmed this year that on an earlier version of Sophie, it was. Long has suggested that Sophie swapped out some of her darker tracks because they felt "a bit destructive," too irony-poisoned for her headspace in 2021. (Yep, Sophie is secretly her pandemic album). His sister Emily told NPR that Sophie wanted to release "her pop album" – or whatever that could mean in a world where pop albums sound increasingly like Sophie albums. But had she lived to see her album's release, I still suspect people would have been reluctant to accept it on its own terms. Sophie was probably meant to sound like the closing of a door.
Sophie, despite not being meant as a career overview, is broad enough in genre to come off as one. But it's a strange retrospective. Sophie reshaped pop in her image, but Sophie, the album, is unconcerned with that legacy. The tracklist has almost no marquee names besides Kim Petras, and much less ambition than her prior work. Nor is it a statement of purpose like Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides; it's more like a Sophie-curated mixtape. There are two kinds of tracks on the record. Some are vehicles for industry songwriters, like "Bitch Better Have My Money" writer Bibi Bourelly and R&B journeywoman Jozzy. (Jozzy cowrote both "Virgo's Groove" and Fergie's "MILF $"; her range!) Presumably, these were scrapped demos – Emily and Benny all but confirmed this to NPR – and they sound like time capsules from their respective chart eras. Other contributors include Cecile Believe, Greek producer and Sophie’s former girlfriend Evita Manji, visual artist Signe Pierce under the name Big Sister, and virtually anonymous guest Popstar. (Based on the scant speculation online – secondhand Instagram communiques from Sega Bodega and Nina Kraviz, mostly – they're maybe affiliated with Shygirl.)
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