No 9 - It's okay to cry edition 😢
RIP Sophie
Scottish DJ and producer Sophie died following an accident in Athens, Greece over the weekend. “True to her spirituality she had climbed up to watch the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell,” explained a statement from her lables, Transgressive and Future Classic. “She will always be here with us.”
Though not a household name by any means, Sophie was inarguably one of the most influential musical figures from the past decade. A pioneer of what’s now called hyperpop, she bent the conventional sounds and tropes of dance and pop music to her own will, creating bracingly original and catchy music. Yet Sophie’s greatest gift wasn’t her ability to create innovative sounds, but her ability to smuggle them into the mainstream in unexpected ways.
“A push and a focus in the Sophie music is to condense particular feelings down to the most concise, shortest form possible,” is how she described her musical aesthetic in a 2015 New York Times interview. “To try and create this immediate feeling, through sound and lyrics, that communicates itself instantaneously.”
But Sophie’s scant discography - one proper LP and a handful of mindbendlingly innovative singles, the last of which was released just last week - only tells part of her story. So here now, we look back to the future of pop music.
Sophie - “Bipp”
2013’s “Bipp” wasn’t Sophie’s first single, but it was the track that put the world on notice: in just three minutes it was clear that nothing would ever be the same.
Sophie - “Lemonade”
Her follow up “Lemonade” was an even more concise digital confection, that somehow landed in a McDonald’s commercial. Sophie actually gained cred with this sync. In that same New York Times interview from 2015 she made plain her feelings about mixing art with filthy lucre. “Pop should be about finding new forms for feelings and communicating them in ways which talk about the world around us right now. There’s no need to view something commercial as necessarily bad.”
QT - “Hey QT”
There was a decidedly plastic aesthetic to Sophie’s early singles (they were later collected in the aptly named compilation Product), down to the album art which resembled abstract plastic shapes. When she teamed up with PC Music impresario AG Cook (the PC Music crew and Sophie shared a very similar musical world view, to the point where it was regularly assumed that Sophie was signed to the label. She was not.) they fashioned a project that blended that plasticity with some not so subtle jabs at pure consumerism.
QT, essentially a virtual pop star, was supposedly the living embodiment of a made-up energy drink. The project was short-lived, but the one single the duo did release in 2014 was an undeniable banger.
Charli XCX - “Vroom Vroom”
Over the years there have been plenty of groundbreaking producers unable to translate their sound for a mainstream pop star. Not so for Sophie. She found her perfect foil in English pop singer Charli XCX willing to fully embrace Sophie’s aesthetic. The collab, which began with 2016’s Vroom Vroom EP, was transformative for Charli, who would go on to team up with AG Cook on subsequent releases and become hyperpop’s mainstream figurehead.
Madonna - “Bitch, I’m Madonna”
Sure, it’s late-career Madonna, but it’s remarkable that as one of seven credited writers (including Haim-mainstay Ariel Rechtshaid), Sophie’s sound dominates, giving Madge a late-career sonic makeover.
Vince Staples - “Yeah Right” ft. Kendrick Lamar and Kucka
In which Sophie recalibrates for hip-hop and loses none of her zuhz. And with King Kendrick dropping a verse no less!
Sophie - “It’s Okay to Cry”
Sophie only released one full-length album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-insides. As I wrote in a piece on future pop for Exclaim! at the end of 2018, “Previously, SOPHIE reveled in manipulating vocals, chopping and pitching them into a genderless cri de couers…on much of this record she sheds the hyperkinetic, AI-generated aesthetic and for the first time, on "It's Okay to Cry," even uses her own voice, unadorned. The result is a record that embraces the disorienting digital future but grounds it with real human emotion.”
Spotify’s Hyperpop playlist
Who can say they birthed a musical movement? The children of Sophie and her kindred spirits over at PC Music can be heard on this regularly updated Spotify playlist (for a more curated approach, check out Charli XCX’s similar, but less algorithmically driven playlist, The Muthefucking Future). The breadth and at times banana-level craziness of these artists (hiya 100 Gecs) speaks to how far-reaching Sophie’s music was and will continue to be.
Kool Kids Music Recommendation Club
An editor once said that the best advice you can give a young band is “don’t piss in the pool,” by which he meant, the music industry is a surprisingly small pool of artists and industry types. You’d be surprised how many people will keep popping up throughout your career, so don’t be a jerk (even if someone deserves it).
Neither Phoebe Bridgers nor Charlie Hickey seem like jerks. In fact, they feel like they’re the complete opposite. Case in point: when they were both young teens Hickey covered one of Bridgers’ early songs and the two have remained friends and collaborators since. Bridgers has jumped on tracks with Hickey in the past. But coming off a banner year, she’s lending some serious heat to her old pal, providing background vocals on “Ten Feet Tall” from Hickey’s upcoming EP, Count the Stairs.
The track, co-written with another figure from Bridgers’ world, her drummer (and ex-boyfriend) Marshall Vore, blends a nice mix of influences. But Hickey Hickey manages to thread the needle and keep himself at the centre of it all.
Jacksonville, Florida bedroom pop musician Yuno’s been relatively quiet since releasing his excellent EP Moodie on Sub Pop back in 2018. Born Carlton Joseph Moodie, Yuno’s music is an intriguing blend of pop, hip hop and emo influences. “Somebody” embraces his inner pop-punk and is hopefully the tip of a very large iceberg (even if it’s just a stop-gap, I’ll still take it).
Nandi Rose cut her teeth playing with Pinegrove, but her own project, Half Waif has been increasingly taking up more of her (and music journalists) time. Hot on the heels of last year’s The Caretaker, comes “Orange Blossoms,” the A-side to a new 7-inch that’s out on Anti Records at the end of February. It’s another stately piece of music that cuts to the bone, exactly what one can expect from Rose.
Brooklyn’s serpentwithfeet has been making experimental R&B for a minute now, catching the ear of many fans and critics with his 2018 LP soil. “Fellowship” is the first track of his upcoming album Deacon, and promises something more concise, but no-less beautiful and fascinating.
I was never a fan of New York’s Cymbals Eat Guitars. They were a perfectly fine circa-2010 indie rock band. But they always seemed like the poor man’s version of a lot of their peers. So I kind of slept on Empty Country, Joseph D’Agostino’s post-CEG project. Shame on me. D’Agostino’s self-titled debut is a beautiful slab of anthemic indie rock with just the right amount of Bon Iver-alone-in-a-cabin-indie-folk to give it that rugged authenticity.
Similarly, I never got into LVL UP, but that has more to do with general ignorance; I never took the time to dive in. That’s changed since hearing Lost in the Country, the sophomore LP from former LVL UP member Dave Benton as Trace Mountains. Like Empty Country, there’s an off-the-grid indie rock vibe to the record, though Lost in the Country is a bit slicker (not a bad thing).
Oh, and upon finally digging into LVL UP they’re pretty great too.
London-based Speedy Wunderground has been the hotbed of UK-indie for the past few years (its big breakout came in 2019 when Black Midi caught fire). Run by Dan Carey, who’s provided production work for everyone from Kylie Minogue to Franz Ferdinand, The Kills and Bat For Lashes, there’s a through-line of kind of post-punky, kind of funky indie acts who take the familiar and make it unsettlingly unfamiliar. They also tend to be very online.
Both Black Country, New Road, and The Lounge Society have released new tracks in this vein in recent weeks. But my favourite of the lot are Squid, whose music unfurls over long grooves. “Epics in minutes” is how I described their 2019 EP and that described new track “Narrator” which features Martha Skye Murphy, perfectly.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Hit up koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms and submissions