Every posthumous album carries the burden of being a career retrospective, a summation of a body of work that can no longer develop.Sometimes these records are like that on purpose, as an artist’s estate curates their unreleased work into a eulogy.
Other times, it’s unintentional: The artist left a fully-formed concept behind, and collaborators must somehow make the most of an unhappy accident.Sophie, the first and likely only posthumous album by the late Scottish producer (though future individual singles or even longer EPs are basically guaranteed), is very much the latter sort of record.
That probably explains why it’s been so divisive among critics and fans – understandably so, but also undeservingly.Sophie was mostly finished when Sophie died suddenly in 2021, and most of it had been premiered during live sets or online livestreams during the past several years and preserved online by the producer’s reverent fanbase.
Sophie’s brother Benny Long was left to add the finishing touches, and the discourse around the album – frustratingly, to everyone involved – has been about how extensive those finishing touches were.When Sophie and Long considered the album unfinished, according to all accounts, they were thinking like technicians.
Most of the changes were the kind of mundane tweaks that happen during the final stretch of an album’s release.Maybe a song had a scratch vocal and the re-recording session hadn’t been scheduled.
Maybe a song was recorded during the 2010s and the audio plugin got lost.Maybe there were contractual issues – addressing the grave allegations of choosing the wrong songs, Long told Paper that every track remaining in the proverbial Sophie vault would “need its own careful consideration” and emphasized the many more collaborators Sophie had compared to her 2018 official debut album Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides.
It’s not hard to read between the lines there.The backlash, though, is coming from f...