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How do you finish a visionary artist’s final album?
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Several years ago, when the artist SOPHIE was on tour, she found herself locked outside of a warehouse that she was meant to be rehearsing in. The people who were supposed to let her in weren’t there yet, and it was sweltering. To make matters worse, a pack of loud, scary dogs were parked outside the space, barking like crazy in the heat. “Most people would have been like, that’s annoying,” her brother Benny Long says. But SOPHIE had an idea.
“SOPHIE obviously recorded [the dogs] and a minute later was in her car, with her computer, producing those chords with the dogs,” says Benny, who was also her longtime studio manager and musical collaborator. It’s an ominous, wordless, synth-based track, fit for a horror movie score. You can hear faint notes of dogs yelping in the background. And that spontaneous recording is now the opening track of SOPHIE’s posthumous self-titled album, which was released this week. The warehouse moment was SOPHIE in her element — producing new material on the spot, laser-focused, synthesizing and mutating recognizable sounds into something alien in the one-woman studio that was her brain.
For most of the 2010s, no artist subverted the familiar into something transgressive quite like SOPHIE. When the then-faceless U.K. producer broke out in 2013 with her acclaimed single “Bipp,” a synth-pop earworm that sounded like a cyborg’s stab at writing a bubblegum hit, it cemented SOPHIE as a rising star in electronic music’s underground. Her signature sound as a producer, a convergence of metallic industrialism, cutesy, high-pitched vocals and squelchy synthesizers, became immediately recognizable, soon sought after by adventurous major artists from Charli XCX to Madonna and rapper Vince Staples.
SOPHIE’s potential as a mainstream artist continued to grow. Initially keeping her identity obscure, once enlisting a stand-in to pretend to DJ as her during a 2014 Boiler Room performance, by the decade’s end, SOPHIE put herself front and center as an identifiable, solo, trans artist in her video for “It’s Okay to Cry.” The artist’s debut full-length album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, was nominated for a 2019 Grammy for best dance/electronic album. And her sound had become an undeniable cornerstone for the fast-growing hyperpop genre, with a new generation of rising major label artists like 100 gecs and brakence building on and mutating the highly processed, technophilic sound she helped pioneer.
But just as her star was on the rise, SOPHIE died suddenly in 2021 at the age of 34 in Athens, Greece, following an accidental fall. Her family says she left behind a collection of hundreds of unreleased songs, as well as a follow-up album to her debut, already conceptualized at the time she was making Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. But the album wasn’t finished.
“As a family, we were discussing it, just beginning to gauge on what everyone felt comfortable with, because I don’t think there was much question about [finishing] this album,” says Benny about the decision to finish and release the album after her death. “It was so clearly SOPHIE’s vision, and we were so far along with it — it’d been a long time coming.”
“I just think if it came down to it, if the choice had been it sitting in a hard drive and no one ever hearing it or coming out — I know what SOPHIE would want. I’m sure,” he says. “She basically wanted it out almost already. So why would we not?”
Still, it took time and care to complete. SOPHIE’s family and collaborators spent three years finishing the album, trying to realize the producer’s vision for the release with the pieces she left behind. SOPHIE was a prolific collaborator, bringing more voices into her process as she worked on her final album. But she was also a visionary, an artist who filtered and fine-tuned the ideas of her featured artists through her singular, wholefully original sound. A question loomed large over the posthumous release: How do you finish a SOPHIE album without SOPHIE?
“Speaking truthfully, it's a heavy task to take on the responsibility that we have,” says Emily Long, SOPHIE’s sister. “Firstly, we understand how much SOPHIE means to so many people, and we take that responsibility seriously. Above that, our own love for her is — you know, the responsibility we feel to her based on that is, just, it’s monumental. … And in some ways, well, we can never do enough for her, you know, because it's just endless.”
The result is a 16-track album that gives a glimpse into how SOPHIE was evolving as an artist, spanning a surprisingly eclectic breadth of genres and influences for a producer whose bubbly, synthetic style had largely codified by the time of her death. Loosely structured into four sections, it moves from poetic, spoken-word ambient tracks — unusual for the producer — featuring dance music household names like Juliana Huxtable and Nina Kraviz to familiar pop songs like the Kim Petras and BC Kingdom-featuring lead single “Reason Why” and abrasive experiments in techno built for Berlin nightclubs.
“She would refer to it as her ‘pop album,’ ” Emily says. “And it may or may not sound pop to some people, but that's her understanding of pop and just making it accessible to as many people as possible.”
The album’s “pop” streak comes to life in tracks like the wedding dance floor-appropriate “Live In My Truth” and “My Forever,” a side of the album that artist and collaborator Cecile Believe says was inspired by the more traditional songwriting experiences SOPHIE had at the time of making them. “SOPHIE had been working in LA and kind of, I would say, exploiting and experimenting with the sort of LA style of writing … you work with a topliner [and] vocalist as a producer, then you sit in the room and you write something and maybe you're writing it for a big artist.”
Anyone who might have seen old photos circulating of SOPHIE in the studio with Rihanna might hear the album’s “Exhilarate,” featuring “Bitch Better Have My Money” writer Bibi Bourelly, and wonder if it was initially for the pop star. “I’m not sure I can confirm nor deny that,” Benny says, laughing. “It came out of something else, for someone else, potentially,” Emily adds. “We’re very, very happy to have it.”
For an obsessive fandom hyper-attuned to the producer’s extensive unreleased catalog, portions of which have leaked online over her career or were previewed by SOPHIE at DJ sets or performances, early singles that didn’t hew to the artist’s familiar pop sound were confounding. With the album release “comes all the criticism from the people, which has been tough to look at,” SOPHIE’s former fiancée and musician Evita Manji says. “And I'm trying to avoid, you know, especially a lot of people asking whether SOPHIE wanted this or not and all that.”
SOPHIE and Manji co-produced the techno tracks “Gallop” and “Berlin Nightmare.” They are among the latest music SOPHIE was working on for the album and represent a left-turn for the producer. The songs draw on their shared experiences in Berlin club culture and SOPHIE’s vision for performing the album, which Manji says included dreams of touring with “all the collaborators in Ibiza and [on] the biggest club stages.”
“I think music, for SOPHIE, was really her mother tongue,” Manji says. “It was the language that she could express herself through the best way possible. And I think that's why you get all of those different styles of music that she would do because each style expresses a different aspect of her personality.”
The album’s songs also stretch across the producer’s career, some originating as early as 2015. They ranged in state-of-completion at the time of her death from demos to nearly finished productions. Benny worked with the mixing engineer Alex Evans, and the two spent time listening to early SOPHIE versions of songs and comparing them, with Benny also returning to SOPHIE’s EP Product and Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. Benny says he also sought out the perspective of artists in SOPHIE’s orbit who aren’t featured on the album, playing the project several times over the course of its development for producer and PC Music label founder A.G. Cook, as well as Charli XCX and songwriter and producer EASYFUN, all of whom Benny says were supportive.
But the process for finishing each song, and the philosophy behind that completion, differed from track to track and collaborator to collaborator. “In every song that needed whatever it needed, be it vocals or whatever direction it needed to go, we’d been working on it for quite a long time and we had discussed a lot,” Benny says of completing the album, which evolved many times over the course of its completion. “I feel like there were a lot of songs where it was like, okay, this song’s great, but the hook needs to sound more like this, or this bass line needs to be more like the bass line in this song.”
Manji took a different approach. The techno tracks she worked on sound rough-around-the-edges, almost unfinished, but that quality is a reflection of the music’s origins as live arrangements and her own approach to their release. “At first I thought I wanted to make some improvements and changes,” says Manji. “Then I decided that I'd rather just keep it as it is, because it's just more important to capture the essence of the time that it was made then to try and turn it into, I don't know, a perfect DJ-able track.”
What perfection was to SOPHIE differed depending on who you talk to. Some of her collaborators describe her as an artist who would sometimes create “thousands” of different versions of a single track. Manji joked that SOPHIE only declared a song finished when its deadline for completion had arrived. The posthumous release was completed by the people who loved her the most and worked with her the closest, drawn from her blueprints for the album and the tracks she had already created for it. But there will always be an unavoidable gap that exists in its music between the SOPHIE album the world gets and the SOPHIE album that could have been had she been here to finish it — a gap some of her collaborators openly accept.
“I didn't feel a sense of pressure, because I think under the circumstances, she would have wanted it this way,” says Cecile Believe, who is featured on “My Forever.” “She cared so much about the people in her life that she wouldn't have wanted them — especially her family, I mean, they were so close — she wouldn't have wanted them to be like, oh am I doing this right? Of course, it's a natural tendency to have.”
“But I think she was always very encouraging of [the concept that] ‘everybody's got to own their story,’ “ Believe says, referencing the lyrics of their song. “Okay, so this is my story: I don't have my collaborator here. That's the story. Let's own it, you know?”
Beyond the 16 tracks released this week, the producer also possessed a coveted vault of unreleased material, and while Benny and Emily say that while there are no concrete plans yet to release that music, they haven’t ruled anything out. “I've said that this is the last SOPHIE album, because that's just right. We couldn't put out another SOPHIE album. That would be wrong because this one had already been developed by her,” Benny says. “Unless SOPHIE was very clear — there were a few songs here and there that she'd scrapped and wasn't happy with for various reasons over the years. But unless that's the case, then I'm keeping an open mind with it.”
If SOPHIE reveals anything about what the future might have held for the producer, it’s how she was refining her approach as a collaborator in the late stages of her career, and how it fit into her utopian and futuristic vision of music-making. The artist was known for her deep interest in transhumanism and how machines could advance humanity or become indelibly intertwined. Her discography is full of desire for a future in which one’s corporeal form could be malleable — its cyborgian possibilities endless.
SOPHIE’s family and collaborators describe her process as inching closer to realizing that dream. By the time she was working on her self-titled album, SOPHIE’s production process had become far more minimal, Benny says, forgoing analog equipment like the Elektron Monomachine synthesizer that defined the sounds of her earliest compositions in favor of transportable software.
“By the end … she could kind of just do it on her laptop,” Benny says. “Even in the middle of a session go outside for a bit and take a computer with her, go into a car, whatever. She wanted to be able to just do it wherever she could.”
There’s a loose, improvisational spirit to the album — you can hear it in moments like the one where the artist takes a beat to record that group of barking dogs — that her siblings say was intentional from the artist’s conception of it and extended outside of the album. Benny and Emily say she was more aware of her fanbase than ever, and was interested in making musical experiences that privileged feedback and collaboration, playing many of the album’s tracks live and constantly changing them and honing them, in contrast to her work for Oil.
“A lot of it was inspired by the live shows SOPHIE was doing. I feel like SOPHIE was beginning to try and blur the lines a bit between studio, live, records,” Benny says. “I think she wanted everything to be kind of like a celebration. She wanted her live shows to feel a bit more like a studio session, where artists were coming and going.”
“She talked a lot about, particularly for this album, not wanting to show up to a club or a venue, press play and just have the album play,” Emily says. “But actually for her to play it live, which is what Ben was talking about. To have these Ableton machines that she had set up and actually produce live.”
Indeed, some of the early recording sessions for this album took place at SOPHIE’s house parties, where the lines between party and recording session were almost nonexistent. “She has a mic set up and she's ready for whoever wants — or who dares — to get on that mic,” Chris BC Kingdom says, describing recording in SOPHIE’s “rave basement” home studio. “If you're over there, you might just get caught on that mic, you know what I mean? But there wasn't the intention of cutting records. If this becomes a hot ass club record or something more on the lines of that, sure! But for now, we're going to have a good ass time.”
Hearing those live moments, and their spirit of vitality and improvisation, preserved on SOPHIE carries a greater weight considering the artistic directions the producer was taking before her death. Her dreams for what her music could do went beyond the typical expectations of what a producer can do for an artist, into a realm that transcended what was possible even in her time on earth. In her visions for her future, SOPHIE, the artist, wanted to be a piece of technology — a tool her collaborators could use to realize their musical ambitions, a transportable studio she could open at a party or out in nature or on tour and invite everyone inside it even for a moment. And that technology is gone.
“She said to me once, when she was already being praised for her skills, she said, ‘I’m getting really close to being quite good at this,’ ” Emily says. “ ‘I want to get as good as possible and then I want the collaborators to come in and I’ll be the machine — they’ll tell me what they want and I’ll put it into me, the machine, and it’ll come out.’ ”
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