In the early hours of January 30, 2021, visionary hyperpop producer Sophie was living in an apartment in Athens. To better see the full moon, he went up to a balcony, but slipped and fell. He was 34, and his death sparked a great appreciation for the ways in which his sonic vocabulary — spiky, twisted, staccato synth tones and ultra-succinct hooks — had moved so quickly from the experimental fringes of pop to popular taste.
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In Athens—and before that in Los Angeles and London—Sophie had been working on the follow-up to her 2018 album, “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides,” and her 2019 remix LP. The new album was so close to completion. that Sophie had chosen the entire song list. Three years later, Benny Long, her brother and studio director, finished it, striving to honor Sophie’s artistic intentions. It will be titled simply “Sophie.”
“At first there were a lot of doubts,” Long said. “But I thought, really, it comes down to: would she want this album to come out or not? And I would definitely want it.”
As guardian of Sophie’s catalog, Long has decided that “this is Sophie’s last album,” he said. “This is an album we had worked on for years. We talked about everything about it: the themes, the track list. So making another album and releasing it as a solo artist would feel wrong.”
“Sophie” features the voices of songwriters and singers Kim Petras, Bibi Bourelly, Hannah Diamond, Cecile Believe, Jozzy, Big Sister and Liz, as well as duo BC Kingdom.
Finishing the album became a family project for Long and his sister Emily Long. She studied music law to work with Sophie and passed the bar exam two weeks before her sister’s death. Once Benny Long decided to finish Sophie’s album, Emily Long joined him in making decisions. “Every day we talked about Sophie and what she loved and the things that would make her happy,” Long said.
Making the final version of “Sophie” involved “refining certain sounds that I know Sophie wasn’t happy with,” Long said. “Or I was happy with this part of a song, but not with that one. We had been working and talking about it for a long time. “So I feel like I had the direction she wanted pretty clear in my head.”
Sophie was born in Glasgow and studied piano and guitar before dedicating herself to electronic music and embracing purely synthetic sounds; the only physical sounds in “Sophie” are the voices. “As soon as he started making music, he always talked about wanting to create something that hadn’t been heard before, and creating joy and surprise and all those human emotions,” Emily Long said.
Since her emergence in the early 2010s, with mischievous, minimalist singles like “Bipp” and “Lemonade,” Sophie’s productions have been bold, futuristic and influential. They deformed every sound parameter: pitch, speed, beat, timbre.
“Musically, this is her, 100 percent,” Emily Long said of the album. “The main thing for her was to hate nostalgia. She was always most excited about the future. And that’s the heartbreaking thing, but also the thing where her music can give me hope that she can be present. I think if this album does anything, it’s that its legacy isn’t associated with something purely from the past. “I think there is a part of it in the future.”
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