SOPHIE is Still The Future

On the reissue of PRODUCT

Hello! Whether this is reaching you in your inbox or your Substack feed, thank you for checking out this post! If you like it, please consider sharing this piece and/or becoming a subscriber! You’ll be sent free essays every other week, with paid subscribers receiving an additional post on the off-weeks. This newsletter is an effort to make writing a consistent, sustainable part of my life. Thank you so much for reading!

The first CD I ever owned was Britney by Britney Spears. The cover had that photo of her on the porch with her knees bent towards each other and her arms pinned between them. She wore a cross necklace. I remember asking my mother what it was. The disc had four different colored pictures of her posing on it. I did not know how you could make those shapes with your body.

Pop music sounds best when you are five years old. Like, imagine; you have only heard nursery rhymes before, and then boom. You hear a song that is basically The Itsy Bitsy Spider, just with a billion sounds happening at once. You had definitely heard other real music, obviously, but you’d never felt pulled towards it. You know what a piano is and a guitar and a drum sound like. No instrument you’ve encountered can make the noices in “I’m a Slave 4 U.” Plus, it’s sung by a woman with the most beautiful voice you’ve ever heard, because you have heard maybe six people sing in your life.

I loved Britney, is what I’m saying. I did not just love Britney. I could not imagine what music could sound like after. I knew Frank Sinatra sounded older than Green Day, and that, hypothetically, new music would eventually be different than what it was. I knew that Britney would one day sound old. I was so excited to hear music would sound like in the future. This is the first full, independent thought I recall having.

Flash forward a decade and change. It's 2014. I am 14 year- old and it is the summer before I go to high school. I had picked up the bad habit of reading music blogs. I clicked on a Soundcloud link for “Lemonade” off a Stereogum article because of the yellow slide on the cover art. From the opening seconds of ASMR foley, the song made me feel crazy. The hybrid of school-yard chants and bubbly sonic artifice was immediately arresting. The nightcore vocals on the chorus were addictive, as was the choice to toggle between twinkly chords and this buzzy, metallic beat. Even with my limited music knowledge, I could tell that the disparate components weren’t totally new; Rather, the track felt like a disc jockey’s scrapyard. It felt creative beyond simple iteration. The willingness to combine discordant synthetic scraping with ecstatic, jingle-adjacent songcraft was infectious. It was plastic toy house music. It was the first and last time pop music has ever felt new in my lifetime.

If you are reading this, you probably do not need me to explain SOPHIE to you. As PC Music, the label-cum-movement enamored with high-tempo EDM ditties founded by A.G. Cook, exploded over the course of 2013, SOPHIE quickly found herself crowned queen of the era. This subgenre music, which a Spotify employee saddled with the title of “hyperpop” is, in 2025, basically mainstream. Every musician you can think has a killer remix from Cook and co these days. Every C-tier wannabe diva is putting out the same record: maximalist, often high-tempo, full of transparent vocal manipulation, and prone to a drone-y thump. And if you’re looking for less diluted successors to that era, the affiliates and descendants of the label are innumerable; Fraxiom, 100 gecs, oklou, Doss…hell, Charli XCX had arguably the biggest album of last year. I don’t hate any of this stuff; Addison is in heavy rotation for me! I’ve gone to my fair share of umru sets! But SOPHIE stands alone. She is self-explanatory.

There is no reason to pit Cook and SOPHIE - friends and frequent collaborators - against one another. But it’s worth noting that they do sound different. The big thing is, people actually try to rip off Cook (at least, what they think Cook is doing on the Charli tracks he’s produced) while nobody touches what SOPHIE was chasing, at least never directly. This is not really a value judgement on either; Cook’s discography is actually quite variable and totally excellent, featuring ambient tracks, old-school tecno, and a randomly perfect cover of “Crimson and Clover.” But if we are being honest about the most influential engineer in electronic music over the past decade, A.G. Cook’s supremacy is inarguable. He can sound like a lot of things, but everybody wants to sound like him.

SOPHIE, on the other hand…she was like Brian Wilson or Quincy Jones. You can sense her presence as soon as a song starts.

Listening to a tune like “Hot Pink” by Let’s Eat Grandma, SOPHIE’s production is so pronounced it feels more like a duet. This obviousness is not a sign that SOPHIE lacked versatility as an artist. Rather, it signals a total clarity of purpose basically unrivaled in her era. She was making music with sounds that nobody else can hear.

That was always SOPHIE’s appeal. She was a singularity with something for everyone. Her debut LP, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, has been stripped for parts and redistributed across hundreds of albums in the past eight years. Listening to it in 2025, it feels impossible to listen to it in a vacuum. What is doubly affecting about the record, though, is that it remains totally unique amongst its peers and copycats. For as many fragments get pulled elsewhere, nobody dares to appropriate SOPHIE’s schtick wholesale. I am not sure anybody could.

Because SOPHIE was also an instant superstar. She held a mythic status not a year into her career. She was the coolest woman alive. She made fillers look beautiful, like birth marks. She was the closest thing most trans girls had to a modern saint.

The implicit assumption of most writing on SOPHIE is that this inimitable quality comes from her gender identity. She came out as trans shortly before the release of Oil of Every Pearl. Music verticals have done their best to correct for initial accusations levied against her music that now read as blatantly transmisogynistic; that her vision of femininity was shallow, regressive, and stereotypical. You don’t really need to read the version of this essay about why I find her music affirming As A Woman Of Trans Experience. One, that essay surely exists in more passionate prose than I could presently muster. Two, I feel it is pretty obvious on its face. Three, I think it does a disservice to the artifice to suggest it is merely allegorical or an expression of anti-dysphoria.

The trope for every trans girl is to list all the ways SOPHIE permitted a kind of freedom within us. The idea is that witnessing SOPHIE’s expansive, non-corporeal femininity was so overpowering that it bled into our own self-perception, allowed us a communal euphoria.

Obviously, “Immaterial” is the best pop song ever recorded. And that song, with lyrics like, “I was just a lonely girl in the eyes of my inner child,” has plenty to offer the genderfucky in our midst. But what was so exhilarating about SOPHIE’s interface with her own identity was her songs resisted anything so pat as metaphor. Transness was not big enough to encapsulate SOPHIE. When she sings, “I could be anything I want,” she touches a kind of sonic metaphysics. SOPHIE’s music is spiritual art. And what is more divine than transition?

SOPHIE’s death in 2021 is a great modern tragedy, a loss whose scope we may never fully comprehend. Tributes to her range from moving (Charli’s “So I”) to repulsive (St Vincent’s “Sweetest Fruit.”), but none of them seem adequate. Even four years after her death, and eight years after she last released music, her influence is still omnipresent. But the hole left in her wake is undeniable.

Last year, a self-titled record was put out under SOPHIE’s name. It is markedly dissimilar from your typical parade of posthumous releases, where the sound booth is raided for any half-finished idea from a dead musician (Did you know they are still putting out Lil Peep singles?). Full of featured guests and assembled with extensive care by her brother, SOPHIE really feels like an act of love, an attempt to offer some broader artistic closure for one of the foremost musical artists of the century. Unfortunately, the record plays like heavily papered-over demos. The album is, frankly, ghoulish. Attempting to sift through these failed seances, I found myself repeatedly recoiling.

In comparison, the re-release of PRODUCT is a more apt celebration of SOPHIE’s legacy. Despite being album-length and album-shaped, this is just a compilation of the singles SOPHIE put out between 2014 and 2015. They were never intended to be a coherent piece. Despite that, it is pretty much perfect. Every track sounds great in headphones, where the aggressively tactile mixing gives you chills; They sound great on a backpack speaker, where the bass bounces around the silicone casing and fills out the track; They sound great on the floor, of course.

Taken as a whole, PRODUCT emphasizes how complexly and confidently these songs operate. When treated as double-sided singles, it’s easy to feel like early SOPHIE leaned too hard on sweet pop hooks oozing out of creepy aughts techno; the production is skeletal compared to the fleshy body of her later work. But played back-to-back, it’s clear how successful and diverse these disparate experiments are. “Bipp” is fist-pumping witch house. “Hard” plays like the prototype for half the tracks on Oil of Every Pearl. The bridge on “Vyzee” is the ironic apotheosis of 2010s Hot 100 bangers. “L.O.V.E.” twists Metal Machine Music into a danceable confection. It all flows together perfectly. It’s an LP that doubles as a DJ set.

The re-issue adds in three contemporaneous tracks - “Unisil,” “Get Higher,” and “Ooh.” It wasn’t until I reached those last two, which were previously unavailable on streaming,¹ that the magnitude of this re-release really hit me. I had listened to the previous songs plenty, often passively on a loop. I had internalized them completely. They became indistinguishable from mantras. “Get Higher” and “Ooh” were songs I had heard before, in Dropboxes and unofficial Youtube uploads. But I had listened to them infrequently and briefly. The idea that there were SOPHIE tracks whose details I had forgotten was as thrilling as it was subsequently heart-breaking. Noticing how the atonal twangs on “Get Higher” bounce between each earbud, or the echoey quarter-in-a-jar clink that she uses for the beat on “Ooh,” was tantamount to a religious experience. The opportunity to learn the quirks of another two SOPHIE tracks was overwhelming- especially because I know I will never get to do it again.

“Just Like We Never Said Goodbye,” which closes out every version of PRODUCT, is a totemic ballad, a three-minute crescendo towards the final twenty seconds, where SOPHIE’s signature pitched-up voice begins to stumble over herself, desperate to get out the words before the end of each measure. It is simple, nostalgic melodrama. At the end of the most recent re-listen, I was on the train home. It was the same train I had taken hundreds of times. I had heard that song hundreds of times. It made me feel things that everybody feels. SOPHIE didn’t make music to self-actualize to; she made music to dance to, together.

SOPHIE was the opposite of a confessional songwriter; her persona was manicured, her music spoke to the parts of you that floated six inches off the ground. So I can only grieve for her in impersonal ways. The most horrible mundanity of life as a trans woman is that you are constantly hearing about the deaths of other trans women; these were real people, just like you, that you will only ever know because of a screenshot of a screenshot of a eulogy from some locked account. There is something disquieting about one of my favorite artists of all time meeting that same fate.

I am sorry if you came to this hoping for a personal essay; my relationship with SOPHIE (and her music) is intense but not unique. It is like yours, probably, if you’ve made it this far. So listening that final track was a mundane wonder, then - that this was an experience she had provided for so many people, that she still provides, despite the fact that we did not know her, that we would never know her, that those who knew her and loved her would never see her again, that in the end it did not matter that she was that her art was a miracle, that it could not stop her from befalling the same fate as tens of thousands of trans people, that she would only get to live on in the abstract space of her art, that this space would never get the chance to expand again, that she would be forever past tense, even as her music stretched beyond linear time.

You don’t get the previous decade of music without SOPHIE, and nothing will ever quite match her knack for musical alchemy. But as I have spent the past few weeks obsessively listening to SOPHIE, one thought keeps lingering in my head; PRODUCT still sounds like the future. Ten years later, it still makes me look forward to tomorrow.

PRODUCT was re-released on June 17th, 2025 by Numbers. Vinyl and CD editions will be released on July 11th.

love ya lots,

helmet girl xx

(p.s. next week will also be a free essay, which will make sense when you find out what it is! the following week will be paid, and we will just go back to alternating from there. I hope this isn’t too confusing! I hope you still enjoy reading it all!)

1. One last song from this era, “Torture Garden,” was briefly put on streaming services at the same time as the re-issue before being quickly taken down. I hope that one gets put back up again.