Sophie’s Legacy As A Pop Visionary Continues To Develop

I keep in mind the primary time I heard a Sophie tune.

Or extra precisely, the primary 10 instances. As quickly as I completed listening to the impossibly tender “It’s Okay To Cry,” the primary monitor from her momentous 2018 album Oil Of Each Pearl’s Un-Insides, I pressed the again button and listened to it once more. And many times and once more. The place had this tune been my complete life? Lots of people felt and nonetheless really feel this fashion about Sophie, which made her demise in 2021 all of the extra tragic. However her affect can nonetheless be felt at present.

FKA Twigs known as Sophie “a star of our era.” To Rina Sawayama, she was “an icon,” whereas Vince Staples praised her for not being “afraid to be who she was, to put on what she wished, to say what she wished, to play what she wished.” Sophie was a pop visionary, an digital music icon, a trans trailblazer, somebody who made an influence on the underground and the mainstream along with her kitchen-sink manufacturing and susceptible songwriting. The quantity of all the pieces occurring suddenly in her songs — clangs, bloops (bipps?), screeches — ought to have led to a pile-up of noise, however Sophie was a talented sufficient producer to show the clatter into one thing profound.

“I feel all pop music must be about who could make the loudest, brightest factor,” Sophie as soon as stated. “The problem I’m keen on being a part of is who can use present expertise, present photographs and folks, to make the brightest, most intense, partaking factor.”

Sophie’s vibrant, intense, partaking deconstructed pop discovered followers in Madonna (she co-wrote “Bitch I’m Madonna”), Kim Petras, Mykki Blanco, Arca, St. Vincent, and Caroline Polachek, who thought-about Sophie a “full embodiment of the modern diva.” She devoted “I Imagine,” a standout monitor from 2023’s acclaimed Need, I Need to Flip Into You album, to her.

Sophie’s fantastically brash imprint can nonetheless be heard throughout the indie and pop genre-smashing panorama, together with the songs of 100 gecs (“it’s unimaginable to overstate the affect Sophie had on me and numerous others, musically and in any other case,” one-half of the duo, Laura Les, wrote as a tribute) and on considered one of 2024’s most defining albums.

Charli XCX’s profession will be separated into two eras. Earlier than Sophie, she was the “I Love It” and “Bloom Clap” lady. As soon as Sophie entered into her orbit, she started to form pop in unusual, new instructions, starting with the thrillingly brash Vroom Vroom EP, and later, #1 Angel and Pop 2. “She believed in me in ways in which I didn’t imagine [in] myself,” Charli instructed The Face earlier this yr. There may be no Brat, or “Brat summer season,” with out Sophie.

There’s a brand new Sophie album out this week. It’s known as Sophie, and it contains collaborations with a lot of her shut mates. There’s Kim Petras on the pulsating “Cause Why,” Hannah Diamond on the beautiful “All the time and Endlessly,” and Bibi Bourelly on the Rihanna-like “Exhilarate.” The posthumous launch got here with the blessing of Sophie’s household. “Sophie didn’t typically communicate publicly of her non-public life, preferring to place all the pieces she wished to articulate in her music. It feels solely proper to share with the world the music she hoped to launch, within the perception that we will all join along with her on this, the shape she liked most,” they wrote when the album was introduced. “Sophie gave all of herself to her music. It’s right here that she will be able to at all times be discovered.”

Sophie is a part of the collective therapeutic course of, however for all its strengths, the album can’t assist however really feel incomplete as a result of Sophie’s life was incomplete. She wouldn’t need us mourning what occurred, nevertheless — to actually honor Sophie, hearken to the music she left behind, and the music from her religious disciples to come back. “I feel if this album does something, it’s about her legacy not being related to one thing purely previously,” her sister Emily instructed The New York Instances. “That’s my actual hope. I feel that there’s part of her sooner or later.”

It’s okay to cry about Sophie’s passing, but it surely’s additionally okay to really feel pleasure that she was in our lives in any respect.

Sophie is out now. You’ll find extra info right here.