How Sophie reinvented pop

“It would be extremely exciting if music could take you on the same sort of high-thrill three-minute ride as a theme park rollercoaster,” the late electronic producer Sophie told the New York arts magazine Bomb in 2012. “Where it spins you upside down, dips you in water, flashes strobe lights at you, takes you on a slow incline to the peak, and then drops you vertically down a smoky tunnel, then stops with a jerk, and your hair is all messed up, and some people feel sick, and others are laughing – then you buy a key ring. Well, that’s the way I like to envisage the potential of the music.”

A year later, Sophie began releasing a series of all-killer, no-filler singles that did precisely that. There was Bipp, first out of the traps, which opens with blithe, sung “doo, doot, doo-doos”, then adds some synth stabs, an emotive vocal – and little else. “I can make you feel better,” the song promises. It’s an unapologetic club banger – one with no percussion other than the melody itself – that offers succour to someone in emotional need. On the B-side was Elle, a dank, dripping track whose digital-whistle hook gave way to stark beats, operatic vocalising and austere synth strings. It was like little else around: avant-garde bubblegum.

Each track came with its own associated graphics depicting brightly hued plastic objects – slides that resembled gummy sweets, impossibly bouncy castles. Sometimes the tunes had no vocals. When they did – Marcella Dvsi was a former Sophie bandmate who featured on Bipp – the singer was pitch-shifted or Auto-Tuned, a way of playing with sung sound that highlighted gender fluidity.

Sophie herself remained in the shadows back then, giving the occasional interview but downplaying the maker’s hand. “Music should be about ideas and sound, not about individuals or ‘idols’,” she told a Czech interviewer in 2014. Nonetheless, she became a cult figure, then a star, over the course of a career that saw her produce like-minded singers such as Charli XCX and Madonna. Sophie died in 2021, after falling from a balcony in Greece while trying to take a better photo of the full moon. She left behind her 2018 album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, a back catalogue of wide-ranging collaborations and the posthumous SOPHIE, released last year. Sophie’s 2013-2015 works were compiled as Product, a collection now reissued on its 10th anniversary with two affiliated tracks from the period. The hydraulic, clattering R&B of Ooh dates from 2011 and features singer Jaide Green; Get Higher, a series of chiptune builds lashed to chipmunk vocals, was first released as a bonus track on the Japanese edition of Product.