This is terrific. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention that closely, but my recollection of Sophie's work to-date is that it was a series of relatively anonymous singles, some great and some just ok, collected occasionally on full-length releases that offered little value over the experience of listening to one's preferred tracks individually. OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES, for all of the different directions that it goes in, has that ultimate quality of feeling irreducible; that is, its contents are balanced on the whole rather than what any individual song or subset can offer. This is especially impressive given that Sophie is ostensibly working within a form - electronic music with beats and builds and drops - that relies upon adherence to a known structure, and from which songs cannot deviate lest they retain too little build-up to be rewarding or too little payoff to be interesting.

Sophie steps out of the shadows a little bit here, not only lending gravity to the personal territory of something like It's Okay to Cry but also stepping away from, thank god, the ironic and cynical accelerationism that infects anything too closely associated with the whole PC Music scene (in which, by contrast, Charli XCX remains mired). At the risk of sounding painfully unaware of what this newsletter has been, I'm not sure that there's all that much value in simply mocking the state of things without also offering some more compelling alternative. Sophie's done plenty of the former, but with OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES moves fully into the latter, merging music, identity, and persona into a single, coherent statement that might be my favorite album of the year.

There's a moment in Ponyboy where, to my ears, Sophie interpolates all-time joint OG Bobby Johnson, and the highest praise that I can give this album is that it does the reference justice.

Highlights: It's Okay to Cry, Infatuation, Immaterial