Album Review - Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides by SOPHIE
OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES - SOPHIE
Main Genres: Bubblegum Bass, Art Pop, Post-Industrial, Experimental
A decent sampling of: IDM, Ambient Pop, Glitch Pop, Wonky
Trailblazing edm/pop producer and LGBTQIA+ icon SOPHIE died unexpectedly last week at the age of 34. The world has lost a hero, a pioneer, and a true visionary. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so personally affected by the death of a person I never met before quite like this. SOPHIE has had a profound impact on the lives of so many young music nerds and queer people alike, and likewise being both of those things, her art really meant a lot to me.
If I was already writing these music reviews back in 2018, this most certainly would’ve been at the top of my year-end list. I pretty much knew this one was going to be an AOTY the first time I heard it, and it still wears that crown for me almost three years later. I feel like the word “futuristic” gets thrown around a lot when people talk about electronic music, but pretty much everyone myself included who knew about SOPHIE when this came out agreed on one thing, and that was that this album was truly going to be the sound of the future of pop. Sure enough, SOPHIE’s influence can be heard all throughout the emerging hyperpop scene and other alternative pop scenes today between acts like Charli XCX, 100 Gecs, Rico Nasty, Dorian Electra, Kero Kero Bonito, and Rina Sawayama who have all taken inspiration from SOPHIE’s groundbreaking work.
SOPHIE helped pioneer the bubblegum bass/pc music sound and her early work was very formative to her PC Music label contemporaries with whom SOPHIE often collaborated but was never officially affiliated. She shared a somewhat kindred vision with producers A.G. Cook and Danny L. Harle, but SOPHIE’s signature sound had always been a bit more metallic, hard-hitting, daring, and experimental than most of the things being produced by the PC Music gang.
I was really only somewhat familiar with PC Music and the bubblegum bass sound at the time this dropped, and I wasn’t savvy enough to be an avid fan until this came along and totally blew my mind. I knew about Hannah Diamond and QT, and I casually liked a song or two by each of them, plus I had already at least heard SOPHIE’s “Lemonade” from my brother’s spotify a couple years prior. That being said, I definitely remember not really ‘getting’ it the first time I heard a SOPHIE song.
It was really only after hearing this for the first time and then learning about her collaboration with Charli XCX on “Vroom Vroom” that really convinced me of SOPHIE’s genius and her unparalleled gift for bizarre, uncanny electronic timbres.
At it’s core, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides feels like an idealized future, like a pride parade in the year 3000 where the Earth is an aqueous rogue planet populated by a sexually liberated and cybernetically enhanced human race.
Two major themes dominate the album: the first theme is the interrogation of identity, and the second theme is the allure, mystique, uncertainty, and fear associated with the unknown future. Both of these themes are primarily explored through the lens of SOPHIE’s gender identity, with songs like “It’s Okay to Cry” and “Infatuation” questioning who she really is, what will she become in the future, and how will expressing her gender authentically change her life. Other songs like “Ponyboy” and “Whole New World” explore these themes through a different set of lenses or in a more abstract manner.
The album starts out soft with the lead single “It’s Okay To Cry”, a stripped-down electronic ballad about embracing the vulnerability of finally showing the world who you truly are. It’s an incredibly tender coming out anthem made all the more significant by how it was presented - SOPHIE used the music video to come out as a transgender woman and the track features SOPHIE’s own vocals for the first time in the artist’s career, having avoided photo ops and exclusively featuring guest vocalists on her songs up until this point, shrouding the artists in relative mystery. The rest of the album features gorgeous vocals from Cecile Believe.
The lighthearted track ends in a sudden flash of sonic lightning which quickly plummets the listener from a heavenly bliss down into the dark cyberpunk sex dungeon of “Ponyboy”, a kinky industrial bubblegum nightmare track that sounds like the sweetest pounding migraine. Lyrically, “Ponyboy” explores sexual roleplay as it relates to one’s self-perception and how it bleeds into the identity of the role player. This track sounds absolutely sickly and I love it, and the transition between “It’s Ok to Cry” and “Ponyboy” might just be my favourite track-to-track transition on any album ever with the way it just utterly sledgehammers you the first time you hear it.
Following “Ponyboy” is the equally dark but even more experimental “Faceshopping”, a thrilling, surrealist, industrial assembly line kind of song about body image and body modification, with scraping synths that create a sort of sonic body horror. The track stops its clanging beats of surgical sounds in the middle of the song for a brief interlude of angelic R&B vocals and laser-y synths that lifts the song to a state of nirvana before hitting you again with the industrial beats. You’ll find that this LP succeeds at constantly subverting expectations and surprising the listener at the turn of every corner, which I think ties in really nicely with the themes of uncertain future.
“Is It Cold In The Water?” is a dancefloor apparition without any beats, featuring more laser-y synths, an ascending melody that plays with polymeter, and a beautiful lyrical metaphor about the growing pains of trying something you’ve never done before.
“Infatuation” is the crown jewel of Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, an ambient pop song that stretches to the ends of the universe with echoes of a robotic heaven and lyrics concerning a search for the intangible true self. I feel something so incredibly profound when I hear this song, like I’m listening to the sound of the deepest parts of my own soul calling out to me and making themselves known.
The next couple of tracks “Not Okay” and “Pretending” are very abstract and experimental so it’s hard for me to say much of substance about them, but “Pretending” sounds like what I imagine it probably felt like to leave the womb.
”Immaterial” is the one true pop song of the LP and it sounds the most like her previous work. It’s a bubblegum bass pride anthem with a level of heartfelt sincerity that escapes most of what her post-ironic PC Music label contemporaries were putting out at the time. It’s also just a really fun banger to put on, and probably the only song off this album that I would play at any normal people party if someone passed me the aux cord.
The LP closes with “Whole New World/Pretend World”, a nine minute glitchy IDM breakdown, and also potentially a benevolent computer virus that’s meant to infect the listener’s mind until their consciousness is uploaded to an ethereal plane of existence. The track has such a y2k pc gaming aesthetic that I love, like some kind of low-polygon AI supervillain like SHODAN from System Shock is trying to take over my body, or maybe even GLaDOS from Portal for a slightly more modern example.
It’s a tragedy that SOPHIE’s life was taken so soon, and it’s a tragedy that the world will never get to hear exactly whatever type of album it was that the artist planned to follow up such a monumental piece of art with. Still, it’s a miracle that we got this.
I’ll never be able to thank the artist in person for making an album that’s so special and close to my heart, an album that challenged my perception of pop music so spectacularly, but for what it’s worth, I wanted this review to be my official “thank you” to SOPHIE. So please, if you’re looking to expand your horizons and you haven’t already checked it out, do yourself a favour and listen to Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides and familiarize yourself with some of the many other projects that the greatest electronic producer of the last decade was a part of.
10/10 highlights: “Infatuation”, “Faceshopping”, “It’s Okay To Cry”, “Immaterial”, “Is It Cold In The Water?”, “Whole New World/Pretend World”, “Ponyboy”, “Pretending”
