Sophie - Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides

The Guardian 80

(Transgressive)

In the same extruded plastic lane as pop provocateurs PC Music, Sophie emerged in 2013 with tracks that were as shiny, artificial and joyously fun as the plastic waterslides of their cover artwork: they lurched around, you could feel the joins to each section, and serious people refused to go near them. A shadowy figure, she was snapped up to work with Madonna, Charli XCX and Vince Staples, before emerging earlier in 2018 with the first single from this debut full-length, It’s Okay to Cry.

Like nearly all the tracks here, it is extremely powerful, and marks a deepening of her already unique aesthetic. Using her own quiet but determined voice, it’s like a trance track with the insistent beats removed – a brilliant trick she repeats to even more dramatic effect on Is It Cold in the Water, like a beatless trance breakdown unmoored from its original track and left floating in ecstatic inertia. It segues into cathedral-filling power ballad Infatuation, a weighty, sad track saved from mere moping by her usual authorial flourishes: whinnying sirens, urgent whispers.

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