SOPHIE’s Wake Stories Kim Petras Shamir Peaches Slayyyter

In the days after SOPHIE’s death from an accidental fall in Athens, Greece, this past January, a similar sentiment echoed online among fans of the groundbreaking artist. Journalist Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard best summed it up in a tweet: “the past tense doesn’t suit SOPHIE.” In just eight years of releasing music, the chameleonic creator reimagined the course of pop, leveling boundaries and bringing whoever else would follow along. SOPHIE worked in the future tense, more interested in figuring out how music would, could, or should sound than working within how it did.

Born in Glasgow in 1986, Sophie Xeon entered music loudly in 2013, releasing a string of singles that challenged the modern electronic establishment. Naming “BIPP” one of the best songs of the 2010s, Pitchfork called it “a day-glo warning shot that indicated just how wonderfully weird pop was going to get in the years that followed.” SOPHIE pushed that process along by collaborating with everyone from Madonna to Vince Staples to Arca. SOPHIE had a particularly fruitful relationship with Charli XCX after executive producing Vroom Vroom — the 2016 EP that allowed Charli to soak up SOPHIE’s experimental tics and translate them into her now-trademark DIY pop playfulness — and continued to produce Charli songs through her 2017 mixtape Pop 2. As much as SOPHIE was known for solo work, collaboration energized the producer. “The most exciting thing for me is going into somebody’s environment and coming out with something at the end of the day that I could not have imagined in the morning,” SOPHIE said in a 2017 Vulture profile.

So, SOPHIE’s decision to then turn inward created a breakthrough moment. The musician’s first video, “It’s Okay to Cry,” showed SOPHIE — who’d previously shied from being identified by face — dancing shirtless in front of clouds, singing with an unedited voice for the first time. It was SOPHIE coming out as trans on SOPHIE’s terms. OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, SOPHIE’s only solo album, followed, a full-length exploration of identity, from construction to its disruption. “I could be anything I want,” vocalist Cecile Believe sings on “Immaterial,” the victorious penultimate song. “Anyhow, any place, anywhere, anyone, any form, any shape, any way, anything, anything I want!” As much as a new generation of pop and electronic musicians found freedom in SOPHIE’s brash blend of industrial and bubblegum, a generation of trans musicians and fans found themselves in SOPHIE’s gender expression.

SOPHIE’s career continued to move in the months before the 34-year-old’s death: a livestream in July, features for the musicians Jimmy Edgar and Shygirl in September and October, a prized Autechre remix in January. On March 5, Unsound Productions released SOPHIE’s first posthumous track, the amorphous Jlin collaboration “JSLOIPNHIE.” Over the past month, Vulture spoke to SOPHIE’s friends and collaborators, along with the musicians that followed in SOPHIE’s steps, to better understand Sophie Xeon’s influence as a musician and as a person. SOPHIE might not be around for the future, but it won’t be a future without SOPHIE.

(Editor’s note: A statement following SOPHIE’s death noted that the musician ultimately “preferred not to use gendered or nonbinary pronouns.” A number of interviewees use “she” and “her” when referring to SOPHIE; we’ve kept the integrity of their quotes.)

“SOPHIE Creating SOPHIE”
Ben Long (brother, tour manager, recording engineer, and producer): From as early as I can remember, SOPHIE was always there for me and always had my back. We did absolutely everything together, from the raves and big festivals of the mid-to-late ’90s with our dad and older brother Mark, as teens helping to sneak me into London’s house and techno clubs with the older kids, to later touring the world, engineering her debut album together, and going all the way to the GrammysSOPHIE was nominated for the 2019 Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album for OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES. in L.A.

SOPHIE started making music on our family computer at the age of 8 or 9, which was around the same time our Dad had started taking us to raves and festivals. She was inspired by and tried to emulate the electronic music that we always loved so much. Albums such as Orbital’s In Sides and Moby’s Everything Is Wrong were absolute staples in our house and always on heavy rotation in our mum’s car, much to the frustration of our older and younger sisters, whose Shania Twain and Disney CDs rarely got a look in.

Success wasn’t something that came to SOPHIE overnight. It took many years of hard work and dedication in honing her skills and devising, then mastering certain techniques and tools that allowed her to craft her work to such precise levels of detail.

It was such a joy and a pleasure to see her develop as a musician, from bedroom beat-maker into one of the most skillful sound designers and original producers in the world.

Calum Morton (co-founder of Numbers; released SOPHIE’s PRODUCT singles): We started talking in early 2012. [It was] the boom of what people wanted to lazily refer to as club music, or U.K. bass, or garage, or techno, or house, or grime. Everyone wanted to try so hard to pigeonhole stuff into these really defined lanes. And then at the same time, you had Rebecca Black’s “Friday” and Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” coming out, and people were really upset about their own notions of authenticity in pop music.

When SOPHIE sent us “BIPP,” it was just so refreshing. It was taking in what we felt like was that freedom of disco and freestyle music from New York. That expressiveness, but with crazy hooks, sound design, and very tight minimalism — in terms of the idea itself, of what it was trying to do. Some people wanted to grip onto formats, for authenticity. But this whole project was dealing in ideas more than any medium. And I think that upset some people, who just want to know exactly what’s happening and for things to stay the same and to be slightly backward facing. The vinyl itself took six months to sell. But it was just not about that, at all.

To me, this was SOPHIE creating SOPHIE. Forming a whole new thing around sounds and ideas. The idea of genre was already old for SOPHIE. And it certainly evolves in crazier ways as the story goes on. There’s not that many people who released that breadth of musical styles in such unique and refreshing ways.

Jim-E Stack (producer): One day, I got another promo email from Numbers, and it was for these two songs, “BIPP” and “ELLE,” by some person named SOPHIE I’d never heard of. I remember listening like, What the fuck is this music? This is insane, because it was. It was just something I never heard before.

I’m a firm believer that the best shit is just the simplest stuff. It was so distilled to the thing that was impactful, with these cool synth chords and this cool vocal, but it was also banging, but not quite a dance track. I was like, Oh, this could clearly have a life beyond just electronic music. It made sense then to start seeing her go on to be in the studio with Rihanna,Rihanna tweeted photos in the studio with SOPHIE upon the producer’s death, although the two have not yet released music together. “still can’t believe this,” she wrote. “Rest Peacefully Sophie. 💔 🙏🏿.” do something with Madonna,SOPHIE co-produced “Bitch I’m Madonna,” off the singer’s 2015 album Rebel Heart, with Diplo. and of course all this stuff with Charli. She was clearly so keyed into something that, just straight up, I don’t think existed in anyone at the time. And that seemed to birth this whole musical movement that extends both deep into electronic music, but so far out of it, and then into pop music. You can trace that all to literally just “BIPP.”

Sasha Geffen (critic and author of Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary): The vocals, obviously, were really attention getting in the way that they pushed up into annoyingness — that sweet spot between feeling thrilled and feeling annoyed. It’s a difficult balance to pull off, and what I was seeing was that SOPHIE was pulling it off with other gay people. Like, a lot of the people who were really, really into that early SOPHIE music were queer. And a lot of the old-guard dudes in music journalism were like, “Well, this is silly, this music [must] be satire,” or like, “This is ridiculous.” That divide felt very clear to me in the beginning.

Everyone had assumed certain things about SOPHIE because SOPHIE was really good at synthesis. Everyone was like, “Well, this must be a cis man using a girl’s name as a joke, right?” I guess because SOPHIE didn’t participate in the identity-making processes around music that were commonplace, everyone was thinking that that remove applied to everything.

Kristen McElwain (friend and former manager): Being at [electronic music publication] Resident Advisor during that time was fun because if you’d go to any kind of gathering or party, the question of “What do you think about SOPHIE?” as an icebreaker was just everywhere. It was alien enough, it was disruptive enough, to where even journalists struggled to articulate it in music terminology, which was perfect. [Laughs.] That was the ideal scenario, I think, for Soph. And we would laugh about that a little bit too, after the fact. I still don’t think there has been another kind of disruptive moment like that since.

“I just couldn’t get enough of it”
Banoffee (collaborator on “Ripe” and “Count on You”; former Charli XCX keyboardist): I was in a heavy clubbing time in my life, where I was out four or five times a week. “LEMONADE” was constantly being slipped in towards the early hours of the morning, and I remember just being like, What the fuck is this? It’s really interesting to look back now and think of the time where SOPHIE’s sounds were foreign to me because they’re everywhere now. But hearing those very industrial and harsh sounds for the first time was such an elating feeling.

For me, as a musician, I’ve always wanted to be making sounds that have never been heard before, but I don’t have the skill to do it. Hearing that someone had done it in a way that I thought was so effective and so unaffected by what was popular at the time was really exciting.

Peaches (musician and performance artist): That music said so much in the way that had this mainstream quality and this really brutal production but still had this cuteness to it, also. It just really pushed boundaries in brutality. That’s the power of SOPHIE, that took this underground, and also really complexity, and great production value, and was not afraid to just fuck it up — and it still was mainstream.

Slayyyter (singer-songwriter): I think it was back when I was a freshman in college — I really deep dove, one day, and started listening to everything on PRODUCT. I was absolutely awestruck by everything I was hearing. It was like nothing I had ever heard before. I became so obsessed so fast in a way that I hadn’t been with an artist before. I just couldn’t get enough of it. The music was so hard, but it was so unique and different.

I started trying to make little beats myself, like on GarageBand. Obviously those didn’t really turn out very good. [Laughs.] But I was so inspired to create upon listening to it. Finding out about SOPHIE really started my entire musical journey.

Shamir (singer-songwriter): I was signed to XL [Recordings] around the same time as they had signed the QT project,QT was a collaboration bet