'She made me feel like I could, and should, be myself': SOPHIE's friends and collaborators on her enduring legacy

It’s no overstatement to call SOPHIE – the late producer who has expanded and shaped the vast majority of contemporary pop with her bright, brash, experimental sound – one of the most influential creative pioneers of her generation.

'The work of a true artist will last centuries,' says Danish pop musician MØ – who collaborated with SOPHIE on her track Nights With You, and Cashmere Cat’s 9 (After Coachella).

'A true artist is someone who isn't restrained by the boundaries of trends and general opinion, who is aware of time and culture in an underlying and personal way, making it possible to see beyond these and create from a free place,' she says.

The once-in-a-generation talent died four years ago, following a terrible accident in Athens. She was just 34. ​​'True to her spirituality she had climbed up to watch the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell,' wrote her record labels, Transgressive Records and Future Classic, in a statement. Her passing was a devastating and tragic loss.

Artists from across the full musical spectrum, from the highest echelons of the charts to the avant-garde underground, paid tribute. 'Still can’t believe this,’ Rihanna wrote, sharing a picture of them both in the studio. 'Rest Peacefully Sophie.' Charli XCX, who made pop an exciting, sillier, and more playful place alongside SOPHIE with collaborations such as Vroom Vroom, Unlock It (Lock It) and Track 10, eulogised her late friend in Brat highlight So I. 'And I know you always said: 'It's okay to cry' she sings, referencing the 2018 single which revealed SOPHIE’s face for the first time, 'So, I know I can cry, I can cry, so I cry.'

Rather than viewing pop as something lighthearted or vacuous, and satirising it in a way that felt hollow or cynical, SOPHIE understood that pushing all of the genre’s key components – brightness, brashness, emotional rawness, attention-wrestling hooks – to their extreme end-point could unearth something genuinely brand new. This bold approach gave us countless classics: from the fizzing, bubbling debut single Bipp to the joyous outpouring of Immaterial – the penultimate song from 2018’s debut album Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides.

'Immaterial girls, immaterial boys,' chanted collaborator Cecile Believe, 'I could be anything I want.'

SOPHIE - Immaterial - YouTube

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When SOPHIE suddenly died, the producer felt right on the cusp of even bigger innovation: behind the scenes, she had been collaborating with Lady Gaga and BloodPop on a treasure trove of still-unreleased material from the Chromatica era, and a new solo album was also nearing completion.

SOPHIE’s brother, Ben Long, had been collaborating on the release as a mixing engineer. Now, following her death, he has completed the album with the help of his family, and some of the late producer’s closest collaborators.

In comparison to the punchy, cranked-up sonics SOPHIE became known for, this new posthumous release takes an initially surprising turn into the haunting and ambient; though for anybody who saw the producer perform live, it perhaps feels in keeping with some of SOPHIE’s more recent experimentation.

'I hope people remember that Sophie was always doing quite long drawn out ambient music in her shows, and even in some remixes,' pointed out Sega Bodega following its release. 'This isn’t new territory or unfaithful to her vision, just something to remember.'

As SOPHIE’s brother and collaborator Ben Long explained to NPR, its foreboding opener is built upon a field recording captured by SOPHIE after getting locked out of a rehearsal space, mid-tour. A pack of agitated, angry dogs barked nearby in the blistering heat, and SOPHIE turned their yelps into the uneasy, eerie foundations for Intro (The Full Horror).

This sort of approach was typical for SOPHIE, sister Katy told The Guardian. 'I remember one time, she made my mum call up a friend who had a really squeaky voice, and she recorded it,' says Katy. 'If someone said some sentence that was a bit silly or funny, she would turn it into a song.'

The record’s harshest, techno-infused moments – the pounding Gallop, and Berlin Nightmare – were co-produced by SOPHIE and the producer’s former partner, Evita Manji. And this self-titled album’s most impenetrable moments, Plunging Asymptote and The Dome’s Protection, are both widescreen, spoken-word slabs of alien weirdness.

Still, despite this, SOPHIE also has plenty of more immediate moments: and indeed, the producer’s sister Emily Long has said that the producer regarded it as a 'pop record.'

Lead single Reason Why, featuring Kim Petras and BC Kingdom, is one of the most obviously immediate moments; a straight-down-the-line bouncy pop banger.

And Always and Forever, with its guest turn from PC Music-affiliated collaborator Hannah Diamond, is a beautiful, breathy ode to a connection that can overcome the usual trappings of time and space. 'Sometimes I just wanna fly into the skies, into the light, transcending time,' Diamond sings. She has explained that these lyrics began with a note SOPHIE sent to Diamond when they were missing one another.

SOPHIE - Reason Why (feat. Kim Petras & BC Kingdom) - Official Visualiser - YouTube

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Though guest star Bibi Bourelly (who co-wrote Rihanna’s Bitch Better Have My Money) has been coy about whether Exhilarate is originally from SOPHIE and Rihanna’s unreleased work together during sessions for the latter’s album ANTI, she and the other collaborators who helped to bring this self-titled album into being have certainly dropped a few hints. 'It came out of something else, for someone else, potentially' SOPHIE’s sister, Emily Long, has said.

SOPHIE - Exhilarate (feat. Bibi Bourelly) - Official Visualiser - YouTube

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A prolific collaborator, SOPHIE thrived in the studio with others, and often helped to empower artists to be braver and bolder in their own work.

'I loved how sweet and authentic she was,' MØ says. 'She made me feel like I could, and should, be myself – regardless of what that might look like. I sometimes feel awkward or misplaced when in songwriting sessions, but her presence inspired me to own myself a little better.'

'SOPHIE really figured out that you can get the best out of other people by making them comfortable,' Miami duo Basside told me in 2021, the same year SOPHIE died. Following her passing, they released F**k It Up – a hyper-pop EP produced by the late artist.

Spanning the entire breadth of SOPHIE’s career, this is not your typical posthumous release. Carefully pieced together by those who knew her best, the starting points for individual songs ranged from fully-formed sketches to looser demos. 'All the layers within each song were already there in some form,' Long told New York Times.

And naturally, there is another final layer to all of this: the aching void left by SOPHIE invariably shapes every single note. Now, when Cecile Believe, the vocalist behind much of Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, sings Forever – a song SOPHIE previously played out at multiple festival sets and livestreams – her words now take on renewed poignancy. 'Distant nights, city lights, in a dream,' she sings, 'I can almost feel you again next to me, beautiful, how I long to be forever.' It can only possibly be addressed to one person.

Though it is being billed as a 'final album' this disparate, sometimes disjointed release feels like multiple snapshots of future releases that never were. Instead, it’s an album tragically unfinished; the only worthy tribute to an artist on the cusp of further greatness.