Pop is reputed to be a safe, pappy form. In the hands of producers like the Glasgow-born, LA-based Sophie, it has become a warped carnival of artifice – abrasive, while retaining cutesy tropes. Her excellent debut compilation, Product (2015), was made up of the barest, but most nagging digital melodies. Sophie’s collaborations since – Charli XCX’s Vroom Vroom EP, Bitch I’m Madonna (with Diplo), Vince Staples’s Yeah Right – have snuck her dissonance further into the mainstream.
On her debut album proper Sophie pivots once again, from faceless aggro-merchant to vampish front-person. There’s significantly more conventionality here, like the reassuring album-teaser It’s Okay to Cry, attesting to this versatile artist’s evolving hyper-feminine persona, and her mainstreamablilty. Immaterial Girl, meanwhile, is a stark house-pop track about transhumanism that nods to 80s Madonna; it’s sung, like a number of tracks here, by Cecile Believe.
The album’s most exhilarating tracks still sound like bubblegum Aphex Twin, not least the closing Whole New World/Pretend World. Throughout, though, Sophie’s defining hyper-minimalism has given way to a new lushness. While enduringly “other”, tracks like Infatuation and Pretending lack focus, and this wafty iteration isn’t as original as Sophie’s other modes.
