Consisting of four previously released songs and four relatively new songs, Product is a brief collection of UK-based producer and rising electronic star SOPHIE’s most mind-bending and innovative works. Over these eight tracks she pulls at the structures and tropes of popular music until they’re bendy, elastic and tactile, submitting to her vision of plasticised utopian pop.
The 2013 single “Bipp” opens the collection, alongside its flipside “Elle.” The former is perhaps the purest example of SOPHIE’s essence, a song that is recognisably a pop song, but with many of its elements stripped away and replaced with deliriously artificial pops, crackles and swoops. A helium-voiced diva promises to “make you feel better, if you let me.”
“Elle” represents the other side of SOPHIE’s creative identity. Exploring competing sounds – spiralling curlicues of synth, might wallops of reverb-y bass – the track is more subdued, but still excitingly futuristic. Later on, the deflating balloon whine and jagged structure of “L.O.V.E.” investigates similar sonic spaces, but without the endearing success of its cousin.
The more melodic and beat-oriented pieces on the collection, such as sublime club pop moment “Vyzee,” with its thumping kick drum and irreverent sloganeering (“Shake, shake, shake, shake it up and make it fiiiiiizzzz!”) are not adequate preparation for the depths to which SOPHIE goes to twist and torment the very concept of pop music.
However, listening to Product as a collection reveals something surprising about SOPHIE, and that’s a lack of irony to her productions, even with the collection's winking title. Together, the eight tracks lack a sense of internal consistency - particularly the arrival of the scary trap banger “MSMSMSM” between the collection’s two most pop-oriented peaks – but when the gentle, laser-guided synths and chipmunk vocals of “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye” close the record, it brings together a real sense of unabashed feeling running through it.
The appropriately carbonated “Lemonade” is endearing and simple enough to have appeared in a McDonald's commercial, which undercuts the apparently subversive nature of SOPHIE’s work. SOPHIE’s music, rather than playing off a stagnant pop landscape by reconfiguring and recombining its parts, speaks to a sense of possibility and exploration.
In his production work for artists like Charli XCX, Le1f and Madonna, SOPHIE has found new avenues of expression, and his solo work has the same celebratory air. Product is not a cohesive album, and it was never really meant to be, but it’s a document of a producer who wants us to know that the future is now if you just let it be.
Product is out Friday November 27 on CD, digital formats, and a four-disc vinyl bundle. Sophie is playing a double headline Laneway Festival sideshow with QT at Oxford Art Factory on Friday February 5, 2016.
