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.)

The best evidence – if any was needed – that Sophie is basically the album the producer wanted to make is, ironically, how fully formed these tracks were even before 2021. “Plunging Asymptote,” a collaboration with performance artist Juliana Huxtable, is a pretty good illustration of the kinds of tweaks Long made since 2021. Like most of the album, the track has existed publicly for years, but unlike most of the album, that version was official, a single the duo released under the name Analemma with Kraviz’s label Trip Records in 2019. (For all the Sophie online leaks and ephemeral lore, it’s worth noting that you can just buy an official, physical 12″ record of it, even now.) Both versions of “Asymptote” are apocalyptically harsh, like the intro to EMA’s “Satellites” looped over and over into oblivion, and purposefully punishing to listen to in full. But the Sophie version is smoothed over; drops that burst through the mix like claws through the screen from a horror flick are leveled out to the same intensity as their surroundings. Those who listen to Sophie for knife-attack production twists undoubtedly will be disappointed by this. But the former math student in me is obliged to point out that an asymptote is a thing one continuously approaches, drawing closer and closer to some unreachable edge. The single-minded repetition of the Sophie version makes “plunging asymptote” an actual, meaningful description, not just fakedeep ponderings. (Those come one track later.)

Other tracks are basically radio or DJ-set edits. “Do You Wanna Be Alive” is relatively concise in its roughly four minutes compared to the alternate versions The album version contains neither Pierce’s full verse nor the all-guns-ready EBM onslaught of the version Sophie played at Unsound. But what’s on record works as its own concept: a descent from the tasteful frosted-glass lounge to the grotto, Pierce’s deliberately affected art-gallery chatter growing more distorted along with the arrangement. (There’s a steady drip sound recurring throughout the midsection that she mixes to sound perfectly dingy and wet.) The record is structured roughly into genre eras – a few tracks of mystical ambience, a stretch of hyperpop, a continuous techno set, and a few disarmingly earnest ballads – but a few motifs recur between segments. The pounding synth hook that surfaces and submerges itself throughout “One More Time” emerges clear and purified on “Love Me Off Earth.” The stretch of “Elegance,” “Berlin Nightmare,” and “Gallop” was essentially arranged as a live DJ set. Lead single “Reason Why” didn’t work at all for me when it was released, but after the somber ambience of the preceding tracks, Petras’ loud, bright hook pierces through like a beam from the heavens announcing that it’s time to dance.

One of Sophie’s underrated strengths as a producer was writing to her vocalists’ particular gifts. The menacingly bassy track Sophie gives Jozzy for “RAWWWWWW” is not groundbreaking among trap singles, but Jozzy stalks through its villainous lair in imperious fashion, channeling the gravitas of the stars she’s written for. Bibi Bourelly has always had more interesting things to say and larger emotions to express than the bland material she’s been given to do it on, but Sophie leaves enough space on “Exhilarate” for her vocals to fill the track, and juxtaposes them with groans PC Music’s Hannah Diamond, meanwhile, is not known for nor particularly suited to edge, and “Always And Forever” is a soft security blanket of a ballad that Sophie leaves relatively unadorned. The downside to this approach is that it relies on those vocalists bringing gifts. Mad Decent artist LIZ was always among Sophie’s least interesting protegees, and “Why Lies” contains some of the worst singing committed to record in recent memory, an ordeal of an off-key melody and adlibs so pinched and sprawling they’re anti-key. This is a Sophie record – an album that carved a lyrical hook out of Kim Petras’ vocal warmups and that extols “white noise more torturous than silence” – so I’ll be charitable and suggest it was abrasive on purpose.

At least that low is balanced by an equally strong high. Cecile Believe helmed many of the emotional standouts of Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, such as “Is It Cold In The Water?,” and here too she is the heart of the record. Synthpop track “My Forever” is probably the most conventional track on the album, and one of the most changed from its earlier form. While the version from Sophie’s H3AVEN Suspended fundraiser livestream was a fun handbag house track, the Sophie version is subtle and sedate. I hear the Weeknd in its nocturnal pulse, and a friend suggested a Carly Rae Jepsen ballad. Perhaps Sophie wanted to distill the track into its purest emotional clarity; Cecile certainly delivers it that way, singing lines like “I want to go back to forever” with no overselling at all. This makes “My Forever” unavoidably eerie; the track was reworked, sequenced to sound exactly like a grieving tribute, even though it couldn’t have been one. It alone would be enough to justify Sophie’s existence; even if everything else on the record was somehow adulterated – which, again, it demonstrably wasn’t – I’d like to think “My Forever” is exactly what she’d have wanted. (And it’s certainly a better tribute than St. Vincent’s.)

POP TEN

CLOSING TIME

Katy Perry stay away from pesto pic.twitter.com/Ek7pfIbD9B

— Mel 🎃 🇵🇸 (@mcnuggetmel) September 27, 2024