SOPHIE

SOPHIE

Since 2013 · United Kingdom

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Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides (2018)

Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides pushes SOPHIE's exaggerated, synthetic textures — pitched vocals, rubbery basslines, sounds that seem to melt and reform mid-song — into service of genuinely personal songwriting rather than pure sonic provocation. "Immaterial" is the clearest distillation, a giddy, maximalist pop song about identity as something chosen and rebuilt rather than fixed. "It's Okay to Cry," the album's lead single, paired an unusually tender vocal performance with SOPHIE's first public appearance as herself. The record argues that hyperpop's most artificial-sounding textures could carry as much genuine feeling as any conventional pop production, and much of the genre's subsequent decade took that argument as a starting point.

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Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides · 2018

SOPHIE, born Sophie Xeon in Scotland, began releasing music anonymously in the early 2010s, revealing almost nothing about her identity while singles like "Bipp" and "Lemonade" built a devoted following among a small, London-adjacent scene of producers experimenting with exaggerated, candy-colored electronic pop. She worked closely with A.G. Cook and the artists around his PC Music label without ever formally being one of them, and produced or co-produced tracks for pop artists including Charli XCX as her profile grew.

Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides (2018), her only studio album released during her lifetime, combined the hyper-artificial textures of her early singles with a newly personal, emotionally direct set of lyrics, and earned wide critical acclaim including a Grammy nomination. SOPHIE came out publicly as a transgender woman around the same period, an act that added further weight to the album's recurring themes of transformation and self-invention. She died in 2021 after an accident in Athens, at the height of her influence on pop and electronic music that had absorbed her sound faster than most listeners realized.