When I first heard the news of SOPHIE’s death at age 34, I could not make any sense of it – it was crushing. Exactly a week prior I had posted a SOPHIE “appreciation post” on Instagram, along with a caption of how the producer was my favourite artist on the planet.

I became aware of SOPHIE’s music through the London music collective and label PC Music, which seemed like this minimalist, plastic mutant-version of pop music. When ecstatic first single “Bipp” was released in 2013, little was known about SOPHIE’s identity. Since then, the artist has become an important figure in shaping how we discuss musician’s identities, rejecting typical binaries in favour of a more fluid perspective. SOPHIE preferred not to use gendered or non-binary pronouns; instead of being either a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ or even a ‘they’, you’re just… you; you contain multitudes.

SOPHIE built music for the future you want to live in.

Raised on her father’s UK rave and IDM tapes, SOPHIE became intensely familiar with electronic music history. All of that genre’s futurisms were drawn to the front, taking old Detroit techno, Chicago house, and UK bass and melding them into chart-topping pop and hip-hop.

Before SOPHIE became a global figurehead of pop futurism, the budding bedroom producer acquired a leaked Autechre live recording (Hemsby, March 2007 if you’re curious) and promptly sought the hardware they utilised. Those leaked recordings inform aspects of the off-kilter club atmospherics of her initial compilation of singles; PRODUCT. It’s a striking twist of fate considering that * an official Autechre remix of SOPHIE’s breakthrough single “Bipp” was released * *one day* before the artists’ death

SOPHIE also beautifully manipulated the works of one of my favourite electronic icons Aphex Twin in a myriad of ways. Not only can you hear Richard D. James obsession with vocoders in the mutated cybertronic voices contained on tracks like “Faceshopping” and “Whole New World” but SOPHIE also seemed to have absorbed AFX’s sense of humour and knack for practical jokes. When PRODUCT was released online at the end of 2015, platform shoes, a transparent puffa-jacket and something called a SILICON PRODUCT which resembled a black sex toy were listed for sale on the website and sold out immediately.

And then there was the music contained on that first compilation – luminescent, electric, mutant, but undeniably pop. Collaboration with vocalists like like Charli XCX, Quay Dash, Le1f, SHYGIRL, Kim Petras, Vince Staples, and even Madonna (SOPHIE’s recent work with Lady Gaga will hopefully see the light of day). SOPHIE sharpened each of their voices jutting into new, exciting and ecstatic realms. But, it is SOPHIE’s breathtaking collaborations with Montreal singer and musician Cecile Believe on debut OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES that reveal her true genius. Cecile’s remarkable soprano is sculpted, collapsed, stretched and mutated on all tracks except for SOPHIE’s stunning solo star-turn on opener “It’s Okay to Cry” and the jaw-dropping instrumental transition “Pretending.”

SOPHIE made room for both aural pyrotechnics, and intense bursts of emotion. “Infatuation” made me teary-eyed even three years ago with its refrain of “I wanna know/ Who are you/ Deep down?” The chorus of “Is It Cold In The Water” sees Cecile’s voice rise to another stratosphere, and the verses are particularly emotionally powerful, especially in retrospect :

“I’m falling/ Depths endless/ Worlds turn to smoke/ One hundred years flicker/ I kiss the snow”

But it’s on what I consider to be the single greatest pop single of recent memory, “Immaterial,” that we see SOPHIE capture the zeitgeist of a generation that’s not afraid to be their truest self. You don’t need to be trans to realize that we are all on the spectrum of gender – that gender doesn’t need to be an either/or binary. Gender can be a playground; a multiverse where transition and change never stops. Underground pop singer Michete shared a vital insight into this idea in a recent Pitchfork article : 

“A song like “Immaterial” goes so much deeper than saying, “Trans women are women!” My personal relationship with gender is a lot more complex than that. I find it much more validating for someone to tell me I can do whatever I want and change and mutate in whatever direction rather than just telling me, “You’re a real woman.” The core lyric of “Immaterial” is almost saying, “You’re not a real woman, and neither is anybody else.” Immaterial boys and immaterial girls, none of these things are real. That’s a much more freeing way of thinking about transness – as this limitless thing that you can continually evolve, that you can customize to whatever degree you feel.”

Losing SOPHIE in the year of loss.

Now, more than ever, we need this kind of belief. This insistence upon agency and possibility. This is part of why SOPHIE’s death feels so devastating, a loss that is horrific in any context, but living in this liminal, chaotic era intensifies the pain. We’re trapped in a criminally mismanaged plague with no visible end. Political leaders in most colonized countries are as detached and cynical as ever, favouring “non-racism” to “anti-racism” and failing to enact meaningful change. Our Black, trans, and Indigenous siblings die each day at disproportionate rates. Against a backdrop of relentless death, this loss stings even harder. SOPHIE glowed with seemingly infinite potential, as both a musician and an individual. If such a luminous soul couldn’t withstand the world’s senseless cruelty – the tragedies, both arbitrary and systemic – what chance do any of us really stand?

In an era filled with so much death and casual trauma, seeking solace in pop music is neither shallow nor escapist – it comes down to survival and actioning our liberation movement; after all, dreaming up whole new worlds is essential to creating them in reality. We grieve for a future without SOPHIE’s insight, but Cecile Believe reframed this with a beautiful perspective in a recent Instagram post:

“I held a quiet vision of her future, one where she could show more of her world as she grew into herself, deeper and deeper with time… but really, she gave enough. So much…”

As well as a shout-out to the queer community that SOPHIE loved so much:

“…To all the people, especially the LGBTQ people who love Sophie on any level, I’m so deeply sorry for your loss. Our loss. It doesn’t make sense. Hold onto each other, you are special. Sophie taught me how to see that special in others. See it in others…”

It is no wonder that I listened to SOPHIE’s debut repeatedly in the summer of 2018: I had struggled that year a traumatic life event, and this music offered me not just an escape, but a moment of reckoning; that there was another place to go, to recover, to heal, to change. To me, the idea that the Scottish producer was “the future of music” rang true because it was the future I wanted to see in both humanity and myself. Author Shon Faye summed it up best in an article for Frieze magazine:

“…How cruel that the future is now confined to the past. Yet Sophie, who knew her body and her gender and her art could all shape-shift, waxing and waning in flux forever, surely will still glimmer beyond the finality of death. She is not gone, merely in eclipse. She is waiting for us in the beating, pounding joys and the inebriated exultations of the dance floor, where we will meet her again and again.”