After recent projects from artists like XXXTENTACION and Pop Smoke felt downright disrespectful to their legacies, clearly cobbled together from sparse voice notes and reliant on guest features, and singles from Juice WRLD’s upcoming third posthumous album have been met with a collective shrug of the shoulders, it’s clear that true music fans have to be careful about which posthumous projects to give a spin. In that sense, one can only hope that the same ire isn’t given to groundbreaking electronic producer SOPHIE’s latest release.

SOPHIE passed away in 2021 in a fashion that only someone who imbued their music with such a sense of shimmering wonder and curiosity could – accidentally slipping from a rooftop while trying to take an excellent photo of the full moon. We haven’t heard anything from her since her 2018 debut, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, and its 2019 remix album, but SOPHIE’s influence has been felt in every corner of the pop world.

Not only did the hyperpop movement, full of the breakneck tempos, bright sounds and play with gender roles that SOPHIE was known for, explode in her wake, but more mainstream acts like St. Vincent, Caroline Polachek, Vince Staples, Rihanna and Charli XCX all either penned musical tributes or expressed how much her music meant to them. Without SOPHIE, there might not have been a BRAT summer – or at least, it might not have been quite the global phenomenon it became.  

When accepting a Grammy for “Unholy,” a collaboration with Sam Smith that clearly took inspiration from SOPHIE’s unique, often metallic soundboard, fellow transgender woman Kim Petras spoke to her having paved the way for someone of her community to deliver a speech on music’s biggest stage. A watered-down album full of unfinished tracks, completed by people who didn’t share a deep understanding of her vision, would have been a disaster, flying in the face of the legacy that she built.

Instead, the way SOPHIE was completed actually feels a lot closer to another posthumous album that both displayed a deep reverence for its artist and offered fans closure – Mac Miller’s final album, 2020’s Circles. Like SOPHIE, Circles was known to have been nearly complete upon the artist’s passing, painstakingly finished by friends and family with an intimate knowledge of their vision. In this case, that task was taken up by SOPHIE’s brother and studio engineer, Benny Long, as well as her two other sisters.

Long has already stated that although his sister still has over 100 other tracks lying around, they intend SOPHIE to be her final album. Some of the tracks date as far back as 2018 – SOPHIE had already been giving interviews about collaborating with Kim Petras, who appears on lead single “Reason Why,” all the way back then. Long has said that the album was essentially ready to release around the time of SOPHIE’s passing, but because she was such a tireless creative and a perfectionist, she couldn’t stop herself from moving onto the next thing. Regardless, the trio of siblings still took three full years, referring back to extensive conversations Long and SOPHIE had had in the studio, to make sure they were respecting her dreams for the finished tracks as much as possible.

As soon as you hit play on the intro – a four-and-a-half-minute ambient collage of unsettling, creeping synths – you know that the album wasn’t assembled for the purposes of ghoulish profiteering. They wouldn’t have something quite so bizarre be the first thing listeners heard unless SOPHIE had told them herself that she intended it to be the first track.

The fact that she could switch just as easily from tracks like these – or the similar “Plunging Asymptote” and “The Dome’s Protection,” guided by eerie spoken-word passages – to sugary, intoxicating and life-affirming pop, driven by her quest to find “the loudest, brightest thing,” was exactly what made her so special – and it’s exemplified on her sophomore album.

There’s “Live In My Truth,” a club-ready track with celebratory lyrics about being yourself, backed up by brain-rewiring crystalline synths and pitched-up, soulful vocal loops. Then there’s an entire section in the back half that morphs into a DJ set full of seamless transitions, as SOPHIE speeds up and slows down tempos with truly reckless abandon, suddenly hitting listeners with a funk section, a percussion sound you’ve never heard before, or the kind of red-alert abrasive synth textures you’d hear at a rave.

Of course, it could never replicate the true magic that SOPHIE always had at her fingertips, seemingly always a couple decades ahead with each release. There are minimal things here that do feel like someone else’s construction – like the coincidence of the final three tracks, two of which feature emotive performances from Hannah Diamond and Cecile Believe, containing lyrics that could be retroactively applied to the situation of SOPHIE’s passing. When you hear a close friend and collaborator like Diamond deliver a lyric like “Always and forever, we’ll be shining together,” though, it’s hard to be cynical.

Others have criticized the lack of SOPHIE’s own vocals, which she finally applied to her music after coming out as a trans woman, or the fact that it does seem a little more accessible – without as many completely off-the-wall ideas – as her previous work. It really does seem, though, that this was genuinely the direction SOPHIE was planning to take after her sound turned so many heads in the mainstream. 

Her siblings have mentioned that many of these songs were spontaneously crafted during house parties to give her friends something to dance to. Details about her personal life, birthplace or age were shrouded in secrecy in her early career, but she had been moving away from that to a place of pride that a trans creator could become pop music’s most influential.

As Emily Long, SOPHIE’s youngest sister, told The Guardian, “We don’t want to feel like we’re not doing what she would want. She wanted to reach as many people as possible, and that idea of universality is sort of tied in with her not wanting to be defined so rigidly.”

SOPHIE is ever so slightly less weird, sure, but it’s still something that only a truly singular mind could create. More importantly, it showcases the care with which posthumous albums should be handled – something that others looking only towards the profits should seek to emulate, because listeners have started to take notice.