Maybe not everyone who jumped on the bandwagon Brat summer they really know where, and above all by whom, this new season of pop started. Behind the path that brought us from the Charli XCX of Boom Clap to that of Von Dutchthat is, from safe pop from the charts to the more stimulating and interesting one which reached the charts thanks to boldness, rather than compromise, there is a producer who – in her short life – has left an enormous echo that even today it spreads unpredictably and unstoppably towards the mainstream, deconstructing it and challenging it to reinvent itself.
Sophie Xeon would have turned 38 on September 17th. Destiny, in the form of a large full Moon, took her away from us on January 30, 2021, in an accident which in its tragedy has something poetic, as noted by St. Vincent in his dedication Sweetest Fruit: “My Sophie climbed onto the roof to get a better view of the moon / my god, one wrong step made her fall into the abyss / but for a moment what a magnificent view.”
Sophie left us with only one album under her belt, the critical success of 2018 Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides (actually there would also be Product of 2015, a collection of his first and sensational digital cries such as Beep, Lemonade, Msmsmsm) and after a series of intrusions into the mainstream (with Madonna, Kim Petras, Vince Staples and, as mentioned, Charli XCX). Little, too little some would say, but the impact of that material was so powerful that it shaped the sound and mindset of many artists who today have conquered the classics thanks to ambitious and daring pop. In its own way, a meteorite.
Sophie was a stone capable of generating infinite ripples in the lake of pop. A movement that slowly settled in the consciences of pop stars and found its sublimation in Brat by Charli XCX, whose acquaintance with Sophie led to Vroom Vrooma duo EP that served as a watershed in the pop star's career. It is no coincidence that right in Brat there is a song dedicated to Sophie. “When I work on my songs I think about the things you suggested,” Charli sings in I knowdemonstrating how even in 2024 the echo of Sophie's work is more present than ever in the thoughts of the pop artist of the moment.
Call it, if you want, serendipity: three songs dedicated to Sophie arrived in 2024. In addition to the ones already mentioned I know by Charli e Sweetest Fruit of St. Vincent (“I'm a fan of hers, she was a revolutionary”, the artist told us a few months ago), we also add Without by AG Cook, who in his sonic forays with Sophie even went so far as to create a fictitious and ironic musical project called QT (“I wanted to do something that did her justice”, he explained to us in our interview). Let's add a corporate like Google which decided to dedicate a Doodle to her on her 38th birthday; It doesn't seem so absurd then that Sophie's long-awaited second (self-titled) album arrived this week, the album the artist was working on in the months (and years) before her death.
«I don't think he ever thought “I'll change pop music”», tells us Ben Long, Sophie's brother who in recent years has worked, with a series of his sister's collaborators, on this posthumous album. «But she certainly always felt that pop should be more fun, more challenging, more exciting. And I think that this is happening partly thanks to her would have made her happy.”
If we think about Bratin fact, we can only agree on the fact that the result is the formative period of Vroom Vroom led to one of the funniest, most challenging, most exciting pop albums of recent years. This was Sophie's lesson (and mission): to take the plots of the mainstream register and push them beyond the predictable and expected. High and low, avant-garde and camp, accelerationism and retrofuturism. “Do it faster”, a futuristic impulse with which Charli recalls the producer's advice I knowin which he also mentions one of Sophie's aesthetic and sound masterpieces, It's Ok to Crythe song that in 2017 revealed it to us for the first time after the naked transition between the heavens (foresight?). A deliberately political choice as well as all the art that has always distinguished Sophie, from production, to aesthetics, to the choice of collaborations.
Ben has always been involved in his sister's music. He was the one who supported her in the recordings and mixes of Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides and, as in the past, he was totally involved for this last album too: «We've always done everything together, alone. Sophie had been thinking about this album for a long time, since 2018, as soon as the previous one was finished. He was trying out all this material in various forms during the tour of those years, continuing to work on it, to modify it, to experiment with new ideas. As in that tour, so in this album, you can hear a greater techno influence.” And he adds: «Say Sophie everything was already there, and we had already talked about what was missing. All we had to do was close the small holes that remained with the indications we had been given.”
Define Sophie a techno album however would be wrong. Sophie it is more of a collection of archive music (year 2021) that shows for one last (?) time the breadth of sound, vision and concept of the English producer. There is techno, or the nightmare of techno, in the Berlin Nightmare with Evita Manji or in Plunging Asymptote with another adventure companion, Juliana Huxtable, with whom he formed the duo Analemma at the end of 2019. There is, of course, also the avant-garde bubblegum pop of Reason Why with Kim Petras & Bc Kingdom and by Exhilarate with Bibi Bourelly, as well as the transfeminist futurism of what turns out to be one of the most successful pieces on the album, The Dome's Protectionthe unpredictable post-apocalyptic collaboration with techno queen Nina Kraviz. «It's one of the few pieces that I didn't see born», says Ben, «but I know how it was born. Sophie and Nina had known each other for a while. For an event in Miami they found themselves on the bill the same evening, so the day before their shows they met in the hotel and wrote down this song. Sophie was like that, she was always spontaneous.”
This kaleidoscope of alien tracks make Sophie a VR viewer that encourages us to cross the threshold of a 3D universe of sounds and ideas that chase each other and continue to dismantle gender certainties. The effect they leave, however, is bittersweet: an album of songs that are dated in their own way will never be able to truly do justice to a producer like Sophie who, in herself, invented the future. We are sure that in 2024 Sophie would have been another 10 years ahead.
“Looking back it's as if Sophie had always known the future in advance,” Hannah Diamond wrote on her social media about Always and Foreverthe song that the two composed for this album. A more appropriate comment than ever: Sophie (the artist) was the future, Sophie (the record) a story of a past onto which we project the nostalgia of an artist who was stolen from us too hastily. In 10 years we will still be listening to the sophisticated layers of Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insidesthis job is more difficult. But today the value of having new productions by Sophie back in your headphones is a purely sentimental question, and in music feelings are often everything.
But why release this album today, three years after his death? Ben replies: «Seeing those hard drives gathering dust was an affront. Sophie was a person who loved communicating with people, and she certainly would have liked her music to be out there, for everyone, and not on hard drives.” If posthumous albums, due to the nostalgic baggage they carry with them, often risk being unsuccessful jumbles in the discographies of artists who died prematurely, Sophie it is saved precisely because it is not a publication that aims to exploit a legacy, but rather a gesture of love. Not only the love of a brother, but also of all the people who participated in it: «I imagine that everyone suffered a little to start these projects again. But speaking with those who worked on it I understood that it helped each of them process this loss. The names you see in the tracklist were not just collaborators, and I want to underline this, but friends of Sophie. There was sadness, many emotions, but in the end joy prevailed.”
Sophie, in the history of music, was a parenthesis of joy. And if this album helps reinvigorate the ripples of the great lake of pop, or music in general, it will have done more than was asked of it. «There is certainly other music on his hard drives, I don't exclude that there may be an opportunity to publish more», concludes Ben with a thread of hope, with the brotherly love of someone who has not yet overcome the loss of a sister.
Sophie it's not a perfect record, but it doesn't have the ambition or will to be either. It is rather an album that serves to remember, and underline, the figure of the most important and influential producer of the last ten years. Now go and listen, let the emotions flow, and remember the most important thing: it's ok to cry.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
