Some girls want to be known, while others prefer to remain obscure. Scottish-born singer and producer Sophie was for the girls who wanted to hide behind the mixer board while still crafting their own magic—and Sophie , her first posthumous record, attempts to reconcile both of those ideals. Known for the crunchy, glitchy production on her hard-hitting songs, Sophie cultivated an intensely private public profile, remaining all but unknown beyond her stage name before she came out as trans in 2017.
She was a producer, in charge of her own image and sound, yet what she emanated more than anything was a kind of angelic alienism. Sophie only released one studio album—the highly acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides (2018)—and a mixtape during her lifetime, and both were heavily instrumental, with several songs featuring a single phrase repeated over and over, stretched almost to its linguistic limits, until robotic clamor and distortion took over. Her very earliest releases, like 2015’s “BIPP” and “Lemonade,” just floated in the ether for a while, with no one quite knowing their context or creator.
(In 2021, Vince Staples recalled that some speculated Sophie was just another A. G. Cook project.
) The 2017 visual for “It’s Okay to Cry” —which marked the first time most fans saw Sophie’s face—placed her before an ever-changing backdrop of clouds, rainbows, and a night sky full of stars, embracing a neither here-nor-there-ness, while.