I remember the first time I heard a Sophie song.
Or more accurately, the first 10 times. As soon as I finished listening to the impossibly tender “It’s Okay To Cry,” the first track from her momentous 2018 album Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, I pressed the back button and listened to it again. And again and again and again. Where had this song been my whole life? A lot of people felt and still feel this way about Sophie, which made her death in 2021 all the more tragic. But her influence can still be felt today.
FKA Twigs called Sophie “a star of our generation.” To Rina Sawayama, she was “an icon,” while Vince Staples praised her for not being “afraid to be who she was, to wear what she wanted, to say what she wanted, to play what she wanted.” Sophie was a pop visionary, an electronic music icon, a trans trailblazer, someone who made an impact on the underground and the mainstream with her kitchen-sink production and vulnerable songwriting. The amount of everything happening all at once in her songs — clangs, bloops (bipps?), screeches — should have led to a pile-up of noise, but Sophie was a skilled enough producer to turn the clatter into something profound.
“I think all pop music should be about who can make the loudest, brightest thing,” Sophie once said. “The challenge I’m interested in being part of is who can use current technology, current images and people, to make the brightest, most intense, engaging thing.”
Sophie’s bright, intense, engaging deconstructed pop found fans in Madonna (she co-wrote “Bitch I’m Madonna”), Kim Petras, Mykki Blanco, Arca, St. Vincent, and Caroline Polachek, who considered Sophie a “complete embodiment of the contemporary diva.” She dedicated “I Believe,” a standout track from 2023’s acclaimed Desire, I Want to Turn Into You album, to her.
Sophie’s beautifully brash imprint can still be heard across the indie and pop genre-smashing landscape, including the songs of 100 gecs (“it’s impossible to overstate the influence Sophie had on me and countless others, musically and otherwise,” one-half of the duo, Laura Les, wrote as a tribute) and on one of 2024’s most defining albums.
Charli XCX’s career can be separated into two eras. Before Sophie, she was the “I Love It” and “Bloom Clap” girl. Once Sophie entered into her orbit, she began to shape pop in strange, new directions, beginning with the thrillingly brash Vroom Vroom EP, and later, Number 1 Angel and Pop 2. “She believed in me in ways that I didn’t believe [in] myself,” Charli told The Face earlier this year. There might be no Brat, or “Brat summer,” without Sophie.
There’s a new Sophie album out this week. It’s called Sophie, and it includes collaborations with many of her close friends. There’s Kim Petras on the pulsating “Reason Why,” Hannah Diamond on the lovely “Always and Forever,” and Bibi Bourelly on the Rihanna-like “Exhilarate.” The posthumous release came with the blessing of Sophie’s family. “Sophie didn’t often speak publicly of her private life, preferring to put everything she wanted to articulate in her music. It feels only right to share with the world the music she hoped to release, in the belief that we can all connect with her in this, the form she loved most,” they wrote when the album was announced. “Sophie gave all of herself to her music. It’s here that she can always be found.”
Sophie is part of the collective healing process, but for all its strengths, the album can’t help but feel incomplete because Sophie’s life was incomplete. She wouldn’t want us mourning what happened, however — to truly honor Sophie, listen to the music she left behind, and the music from her spiritual disciples to come. “I think if this album does anything, it’s about her legacy not being associated with something purely in the past,” her sister Emily told The New York Times. “That’s my real hope. I think that there’s a part of her in the future.”
It’s okay to cry about Sophie’s passing, but it’s also okay to feel joy that she was in our lives at all.
Sophie is out now. You can find more information here.
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