SOPHIE: In Review

For the first article in our Women’s History Month editorial series we’re doing track reviews for SOPHIE’s debut album, in honor of the contributions she made to contemporary music production before her tragic death.

SOPHIE pushed popular musical tropes into overdrive, from buzzing, bubbly bass tones past the edge of distortion to clangingly bright synth lines and haunting voices autotuned to superhuman cyborg levels. Her debut album, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, spans a wide emotional range.  The album title hints at some of its themes: pearls suggest hard shiny exteriors, surface level in their beauty and value, but also inseparable from the soft vulnerable interiors of the creatures that produce them.  The idea that insides and outsides are opposites yet simultaneously interdependent forms the album’s central thematic tension.  SOPHIE’s artistic fascination with these topics is no doubt informed by her experience as a trans woman.

SOPHIE takes common pop music tropes and stretches them past their limit, effectively exposing the strangeness in the everyday. With top 40 radio stations dominated by auto-tuned voices and social media flooded with facetuned photos, artificial alterations can easily become the norm, causing authenticity itself to become a commodity. By pushing popular tropes to their limits, SOPHIE makes these conventions impossible to ignore, forcing us to question the status quo and acknowledge our subconscious assumptions about the world and ourselves.

OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES begins with “It’s Okay To Cry”, a comparatively quiet, vulnerable overture that at first contains only slight hints at the clanging percussive stabs that will later dominate the sonic landscape.  The track evolves into a dramatic, reverberant, percussive bridge into the metallic, distorted clangs and whip cracks of “Ponyboy” and “Faceshopping”. 

In “Faceshopping”, SOPHIE uses extreme vocal effects to create a processed robotic voice, blurring the boundaries between machine and human, real and artificial, and intelligible speech and sound.  The sonic and lyrical elements of Faceshopping come together to form a commentary on authenticity, body image, social media, gender performance and identity, and the capitalist systems that profit off of bodies, including the artist as a commodity.

“Is It Cold In The Water?” brings the listener to an entirely new place, with screeching, squeaking synth sounds.  SOPHIE’s playful, piercing vocals on the track are evocative of Kate Bush, but in context are entirely her own.  The bridge brings some vulnerability and a dive below the surface to talk about experience rather than appearance (“Do you feel what I feel? / Do you see what I see?”).

The interlude “Not Okay” alternates between blasting overwhelming bass notes and sharp syncopated synth lines with haunting vocals floating over the top.  “Pretending” takes us to a cavernous, ambient space, before we emerge into “Immaterial”, a triumphant anthem for gender-fluid joy which synthesizes many of the album’s themes.  “Immaterial” responds playfully to Madonna’s “Material Girl”, rewriting its gender dynamics and lyrically addressing themes of opposites, identity, and selfhood while pushing pop tropes to the edge.

SOPHIE’s distorted, superhuman voice in Immaterial sings “And no matter where I go /You’ll always be here in my heart”. SOPHIE, we don’t know where you are now, but we hope we’re still in your heart.