‘The Loudest, Brightest Thing’

Late one evening when I was twenty, a boy I liked shared a theory: queer people who come out in adulthood go through a second adolescence. Freed from the terrors and inhibitions of the closet, these late bloomers have to relearn how to navigate the big feelings that come with living in a body, hopelessly bound to other bodies by sex and gender. This made me furious; I was, of course, the case in point. (He can’t have come out more than three or four years before me, which made the idea seem particularly condescending.) It didn’t occur to me that starting from scratch might be a gift—something to revel in rather than suffer through.

I’m able to think of that boy and his theory more generously now, as I remember what it felt like to hear the English producer and DJ Sophie for the first time. Her earliest singles appeared in 2013, when I was twenty-two. Their simple hooks, pitch-shifted vocals, and minimal, metallic arrangements offered not a return to adolescence but an alien childhood. She was my microgeneration’s Peter Pan, if Peter Pan were a hyperfeminine android.

The first Sophie song that a friend played for me was called “Bipp,” for some reason. On it, an anonymous singer promises, “However you’re feeling, I can make you feel better.” Punctuating coos and shouts bring to mind an aspiring cheer captain or the star of a middle school talent show, but with the tinny edge of a deeper voice that’s been artificially accelerated. The effect isn’t quite Alvin and the Chipmunks, but neither is it credibly human. Whatever she was, I believed her.

Lacking clues—the song seemed to come from nowhere, with no PR and no video—I guessed the title was onomatopoetic. Beneath the voice’s reassuring overtures, mechanical tones bounce, skitter, and pop. As more tracks followed, and with them a few pieces of lore, we learned that Sophie didn’t sample. All of her sounds were synthetically generated (programmed at first on the audio software Logic, later on Ableton). Deprived of concrete referents like drum or guitar, the listener reaches for metaphor: critics have described her inventions as “sticky” and “rubbery”; “a laser coated in latex” and “uncanny candy”; “crunchy” and “gloopy, dripping” and on “a more angelic plane.” In their variety and precision, Sophie’s tracks have made me think of dental drills and barking seals, screws tumbling in a clothes dryer and a marimba built from car parts, an autotuned leaky faucet and a robot gasping for air, the ticking hands of the doomsday clock and the sunny chime of my number being called at the DMV.

The sonic world Sophie made was often exhausting but evidently inexhaustible. When she confirmed her identity as a trans woman in 2017, she substantiated some listeners’ intuitions about why that world felt so necessary. She had created a language with which to explore feelings too inchoate—too big, too raw—to be spoken: desire as well as dissociation, unanticipated pleasures and ineradicable pains, living in a body and leaving it behind. She outgrew the not-quite-child’s voice of her early singles (collected on the 2015 compilation Product), but each successive track struck its own balance between the intimate and the unnatural. “Ecstasy, feelings, feelings in my skin,” she sings on her debut studio album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, “promises of a life uncontained, seafoam blue”—or at least a lyric video on YouTube tells me she does; her voice is so deep and garbled as to be almost inaudible, bubbling up amid dense, martial bursts of sound. The song is called “Whole New World/Pretend World,” but Sophie’s is no paradise. Her frequent collaborator Cecile Believe chants the title phrase in ominous deadpan. (Neverland, too, teemed with crocodiles and pirates.)

Sophie died in 2021, at thirty-four, after falling off a balcony in Athens while looking at the moon. It felt impossible to lose someone who was always both renovating our insides and running out ahead. Her second full-length album, Sophie, which collects material that was nearly finished at the time of her death, was released this September. It’s occasionally transcendent, and while I confess to finding some tracks skippable, I can’t regret the bagginess when I know we won’t be getting more from her. Her brother and studio manager, Benny Long, who completed and released Sophie with his sister Emily Long, has told reporters that it will be her final album.

Each time we saw Sophie, we saw a little more of her. In 2014, at a cavernous dim sum hall–turned–party venue in Manhattan’s Chinatown, we couldn’t see her at all. A photo on my phone shows the crowd: arms thrown up in a foggy mass, everyone facing a ball of white light that blots out the DJ booth. Three years later at MoMA PS1’s summer music series Warm Up—outdoors, daytime—her head bounced behind a massive turntable, red hair crimped in a bob just an inch or two shorter than a Hollywood starlet’s. My most vivid memory is of her standing off to the side afterward, catching up on texts.

By the time I saw her at Brooklyn Steel in September 2018, she had become a star. She stood center stage in a gold miniskirt and heels, amid a swirl of dancers and guest vocalists. Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, which was released that summer, included the first songs to feature her own voice, with her own face appearing on the cover and in music videos. The abstract girl of “Bipp” had matured into Sophie herself.

She didn’t owe us visibility. For years she had refused it; her anonymity was all that we knew about her. On the question of her appearance, she told Pitchfork in a 2013 interview—conducted by e-mail—“Nobody cares.” Journalists who described her music with intelligence became unimaginative and even hostile in the face of this absence: Sophie was assumed to be a male producer, her slipperiness assumed to be a “tiresome” strategy for drumming up buzz. In a 2014 article that has since been taken down, Fader accused Sophie and the producer A.G. Cook—the head of PC Music, a London-based label that shared Sophie’s bubblegum-pop aesthetic—of “appropriating and objectifying stereotypically feminine identities while obscuring their own.” That year, the two of them had collaborated on the ambiguously parodic single “Hey QT,” with a fictional frontwoman, QT, who purported to advertise an energy drink that shared her name. Her girlish vocals were reminiscent of “Bipp,” but this hypothetical singer was given a body and a job to do.

The discomfort was not a mere confection of the press. I remember debating “Hey QT” at the time with friends who found it guilty of the sexism and consumerism that I took it to be satirizing. The best line of defense, it seemed then, was that the song was ironic, though that interpretation didn’t really interest me. It would have been more vulnerable than I could yet manage to say that I heard a kind of innocence in the childlike voice that beckoned to my own. I recognized that my earnest attachment to Sophie’s songs cut against the grain of lyrics like “I put my hands on my body/Every time you think of me, boy,” which were arguably glib and frankly sexualizing. Still, it baffled me to read that Sophie and Cook were “detached” and “soulless.” If anything, their music made me nauseous with feeling.

In hindsight it’s clear that satire, no less than appropriation, was too sober a word for what Sophie was up to. Her allegiance to pop music was sincere; the genre represented the purest pursuit of what she called “the loudest, brightest thing.” And while some of us warred over identity’s narrow turf, Sophie kept eroding it. In her first in-person interview in 2015, she told Rolling Stone that her live shows aimed at “completely overriding your cognitive process and becoming a directly centered physical thing.” She coaxed us out of the private recesses of selfhood, toward the dancefloor’s obliterating grace.

The lead single for Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, released in the fall of 2017, appeared to mark a turning point for Sophie. “It’s Okay to Cry” is a ballad, of all things, emotionally oversaturated in the manner not of the schoolyard but of Celine Dion. Gently arpeggiated synths and warm, resonant chords bolster Sophie as she sings in what sounds like her natural register: “And even after all this time,/Just know you’ve got nothing to hide.” Small flourishes betray the artist’s distinctive hand: her voice has a faintly digital sheen, she repeats the title line in a hammy stage whisper, glitchy thunderclaps rumble around her. Even so, the song wouldn’t be out of place on FM radio.

The music video, which she directed, consists of an uninterrupted shot of her filmed from the chest up, authorizing the listener’s vulnerability with her own. It was received as the answer to a question—here was a woman, literally stripped bare—but the video has its own tonal ambiguities. During the bridge Sophie rubs her temples and fingers her lips; behind her a rainbow gives way to a sunset, then the northern lights, then outer space, like some hallucinated screensaver.

In the ensuing press tour, Sophie gamely riffed on her transition (with occasional hints of impatience, as when she told Lenny Letter, “I think it’s kind of ridiculous that you need to do a video that’s a close-up crying in the rain for people to know that you’re a real person”). But if “It’s Okay to Cry” dropped the pretense of obscurity, the rest of the album induced further disorientations. “I’m real when I shop my face,” Cecile Believe teases on “Faceshopping,” between whirs, clangs, and booms. In a music video, Sophie’s face—the face we’d only just begun to get acquainted with—stretches and melts. (Subtlety was never her goal.) “Reduce me to nothingness,” Cecile Believe pleads in the bridge. A series of dark, oceanic tracks midway through the album seems to grant her wish.

Sophie remained uninterested in any ideal of authenticity. As her star rose, her palette defined the genre that came to be known as hyperpop, and she started writing and producing for more mainstream or soon-to-be mainstream performers, like Charli XCX, Kim Petras, Vince Staples, and Madonna. (On “So I,” a tribute to Sophie from this summer’s ubiquitous brat, Charli XCX remembers “things you’d suggest:/‘Make it faster!’”) Collaboration was one more way for Sophie to reconceive her sensibility, testing what other sounds she could accommodate—and what new stages could be made to accommodate her.

This was true throughout her catalog, but Sophie makes it explicit: all but one of the album’s sixteen tracks credit a featured artist. Sophie devised the album in conjunction with her live show, and it’s appropriately social. (A few of these songs were already on the set list when I saw her in 2018.) I can imagine standing in a crowd as the various textures and tempos wash over me, but the tracks are clustered in a way that facilitates selective listening. Some atmospheric and abrasive opening experiments give way to a trio of warmer, inviting pop songs, followed by a club-ready techno run and a concluding stretch with an elegiac edge.

I’ve already settled into my favorite corners of the album, as I guess most listeners will; only Sophie was flexible enough to be equally at home in all of them. The high points, for me, are the pop songs, which manage to be at once clever, strange, and entirely sincere. “Exhilarate,” for example, featuring Bibi Bourelly, is an unabashedly motivational anthem worthy of Rihanna or Sia: “Got my foot on the gas, got my foot on the gas/I be going way too fast for myself.” But the soaring chorus and galloping beat are littered with odd little squelches—an undercurrent of dread or self-doubt, I think, beneath the pep talk. For thirty seconds after what seems like the end, eerie caws echo arrhythmically, like a vulture descending to pick at the song’s carcass.

Sophie finishes where the artist often found herself, on the knife-edge between affirmation and dissolution. The lush, tender “Always and Forever” features the PC Music mainstay Hannah Diamond singing, “Sometimes I just wanna fly/Into the skies, into the light.” “High up, wonder why I’m so lonely…Everybody’s got to own their body,” answers Cecile Believe on “My Forever.” A final track, “Love Me Off Earth,” splits the difference, delivering some familiar pleasures. The pulsing beat and bass-heavy synths are steadying rather than frenetic; the handful of lyrics are cryptic but discernible; the voice that sings them is the human voice of the musician Doss—until, two minutes in, the tempo jumps and the bass falls out. It was only when the title phrase recurred in a new register, high-pitched and degraded, that I understood what it might mean to be loved “off” earth: to sink so deeply into the physical world that you discover an exit from it. The song points back to Sophie’s inaugural taunt on “Bipp,” shopworn, portentous, irresistible: “If that’s what you want, boy/Then you know where to find me.”