Sophie ‘Sophie’ Review: An Uneven Approximation of a Pop Auteur’s Vision

Listening to Sophie’s posthumous self-titled album, which was supposedly nearly complete when she died due to a fall in January 2021, one can’t help but think that the British electronic producer and popsmith could have made most of these songs in her sleep. From the beats that sound like they’re alive, mutating and reformulating in real time, to the metallic or leather-whip percussion, to the sparkly bubblegum-pop—we’ve heard all of this from her before, only better. That’s because what’s glaringly missing from Sophie is the artist who wasn’t afraid to be almost antagonistic, with songs that stopped in the thick of things or piled on a bunch of noises on top of one another in an ear-splitting cacophony.

Sophie offers a watered-down iteration of this approach. It’s Sophie as middling, vaguely futuristic pop producer, not pioneering soundscape architect whose songs just happened to be catchy. Maybe that’s the direction she was headed as an artist. But the album is dubiously conceived and sequenced: There are two ghostly ambient songs here, “Intro (Full Horror)” and the seven-and-a-half minute “The Dome’s Protection,” that effectively center the album around the absence and tragedy of Sophie’s loss, but they’re placed too close together in the tracklist.

Sophie finds its stride in its propulsive middle section. The little stinker of a distorted airhorn hook on “Berlin Nightmare” oozes with attitude, reminding you how, even without any vocals, Sophie could communicate so much personality and emotion through sound. And it’s this suite of songs that best exhibits her inimitable mastery of rhythm, from the sprightly synth and drum pad interplay at the end of “Why Lies” to the urgency and dizzying discombobulation weaved throughout “Gallop.” In other spots on the album, though, the rhythmic complexity isn’t nearly as thorny and twisted as the artist was capable of in her heyday.

Identity was obviously an integral element of Sophie’s music, something she was able to express with myriad ingredients, notably through her voice. Her vocal manipulations—which obscured her identity from the public for the first few years of her career—pointed to the fact that no sense of self is truly stable, that it’s always customizable.

Here, we never hear Sophie, replaced with a roster of friends and past collaborators like BC Kingdom, Bibi Bourelly, and Kim Petras. But aside from the rather arch spoken word of Juliana Hutxable on the amazingly titled “Plunging Asymptote” or Hannah Diamond’s heartfelt emoting on “Always and Forever,” the guests often actively drag potentially interesting musical ideas into the realm of basic pop.

As evidenced by the telenovela sweep of “It’s Okay to Cry,” Sophie knew how to bring the right balance of schmaltz, camp, irony, and sincerity to her music. Without her patented mix of prankish wit and bleeding-heart expressivity to guide the project, though, Sophie feels more like a diluted approximation of a true visionary’s unique brand of pop.