OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES, experimental pop producer SOPHIE's first release since the 2015 singles compilation Product and, in many ways, her proper debut, is more than an album: it's a fully immersive experience. "There's a world inside you," she sings partway through the opening track, and OIL is an encapsulation of that world, created by herself and shared with her listeners. In this "whole new world," which transcends the restrictions of our current, often frustratingly limited reality, we can explore and embody the ideal versions of ourselves, as SOPHIE seems to do on the album's cover. Posed with regal opulence against a hyper-surreal landscape, with her sharp cheekbones, fiery crown of hair, and iridescent clothing, she resembles a Renaissance painting from the future, a sort of 31st-century mermaid-human-cyborg. The word "nothingness" appears, almost brand-like, on her gloved arm, but this isn't a negative label forced upon her by others. It's her basest desire: immateriality, the incorporeal freedom to "be anything I want." This extends beyond her personal identity as a transgender woman to a transhumanist examination of how to exist and evolve in an often antagonistic and confusing society, a theme investigated through a dizzying array of stylistic lenses across the album's nine tracks.
SOPHIE has expressed wariness at the idea of critical engagement with her music. Her goal is to make music "that goes straight to the senses, straight to the body . . . Just how does that make you feel? Is it fun and furious?" At the same time, there are clearly layers to what she's doing, which is what makes it so compulsively listenable. This is truer on OIL than ever before. Its songs are first experienced in a primal, visceral way, as adrenaline-pumping sensory overload injected straight into the veins. You're not sure what you're hearing, but you're inexplicably drawn to it even in its weirdest and harshest moments. Once you're hooked on the sound, you then realize how surprisingly deep these songs go, how much densely-embedded meaning they contain, and you can't stop listening until you feel like you've fully unlocked the enigma of them.
One of these enigmas is the album's sequencing, which at first comes across as haphazard but makes sense in accordance to SOPHIE's vision of what pop music can be. Back in 2012, she described the ideal impact of her music using the metaphor of a rollercoaster, "where it spins you upside down, dips you in water, flashes strobe lights at you, takes you on a slow incline to the peak, and then drops you vertically down a smokey tunnel, then stops with a jerk, and your hair is all messed up, and some people feel sick, and others are laughing - then you buy a key ring." Before OIL's release, her 2014 single "Hard" perhaps best embodied this philosophy, with its equally nauseating and exhilarating mash-up of industrial clamor, cutesy high-pitched vocals, and constant interruptions of shimmering synths and jagged electric-guitar-styled bursts, all synchronized to cheeky BDSM-themed lyrics ("Latex gloves, smack so hard . . . Ponytail, yank so hard").
SOPHIE employed this metaphor again in April of this year, stating, "At theme parks, when you're a child, you'd have this visceral experience of being human and I want music to feel like that . . . Just the way that rollercoasters tend to be designed - with the tension and the release and feeling those nerves and being locked into the seat - I feel like pop music could take you on that sort of journey." OIL's track order seems to be organized according to this principle. Opener "It's Okay to Cry," a sparkling synth-pop ballad about self-acceptance that sets up the album's recurring motif of fully embracing one's interior truth as a means of overcoming anxiety and doubt, is unassumingly tranquil. (Upon its video release in October, it was also unexpectedly personal, relying for the first time upon the producer's own voice and image.) It's the rollercoaster's slow, steady ascent to the top of the slope, where it hangs for a moment in breathtakingly perfect suspension before hurtling downward at top speed. The song's explosive, cathartic finale previews the descent. Then the post-industrial aggression of "Ponyboy" and "Faceshopping" arrives to furiously drop you into the ride's darkest pits.
These two tracks also introduce Cecile Believe, the primary vocalist for much of the album and, presumably, SOPHIE's creative partner in shaping it: she's credited as co-writer on six tracks and plays a vital role in the accompanying live performances. Here, her voice helps SOPHIE explore a multitude of contradictions that might be more complementary than they seem. On "Ponyboy," her squeaky, coquettish intonation during the chorus is juxtaposed against SOPHIE's vocals in the verses, distorted beyond recognition to sound militantly robotic. On "Faceshopping," a melisma-drenched bridge suited for a pop diva is plopped jarringly into the middle of a thrillingly abrasive synth drop. This relentless back and forth between loud and quiet, hard and soft, difficult and accessible, all of it tied up in stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, begins to break down the barriers that create these dichotomies in the first place to get at the raw, emotional center of what such sounds can provoke.
Thematically, "Faceshopping" is particularly relevant to the album's larger arc. With its catchy refrain, "I'm real when I shop my face," it plays with the idea of body modification, in both physical and digital realms, as a means of accessing a more authentic self. The rules dictating what can and cannot be deemed genuine expression are another social construct for which SOPHIE has no use, in both life and art. As she explains, "[With] things like body augmentation, you can find something that's actually more real," a statement that applies equally to electronic music: its artificiality can be used to access truths just as easily as more organic forms of music. Similarly, when SOPHIE growls phrases like "hydroponic skin, "chemical release," and "plastic surgery," she evokes procedures that are often perceived as vain but actually help bring many people (particularly trans individuals) closer to their true selves. This coincides with the theme of immateriality in the song's bridge. "You must be the one that I've seen in my dreams," Cecile Believe croons lovingly before commanding an ideal, interior self to "reduce me to nothingness." This goes a step beyond mere transformation, suggesting a desire to transcend the trappings of a body altogether and find more meaningful ways to define one's relation to the world.
It's at this point we reach the "dipped in water" portion of the rollercoaster ride, only it's more like being plunged into a bottomless sea. Having provided a thesis statement for what artificiality can represent emotionally, SOPHIE now sets about proving it. The hypnotic waves of arpeggiated synth in "Is It Cold in the Water?" create a sensation of being adrift and alone, questing and uncertain, that's intensified by the sparse lyrics: "I'm freezing/I'm burning/I've left my home." The chorus repeatedly asks the title question, the single syllable of "cold" stretched out endlessly, like someone on the precipice of change but hesitant to take the dive (think a futuristic spin on Kate Bush's "Under Ice"). The transition into "Infatuation" is seamless, and the songs feel like two sides of the same coin. The narrator in "Is It Cold in the Water?" is not alone but supported by someone close to them (or maybe even an alternative self) who insists, with increasing intensity, "I want to know/Who are you deep down?" It's an important inquiry, one with which the entirety of OIL grapples, and the relief of hearing it asked informs the atmosphere of the entire song, which is ethereal and serene, anchored by an inchoate synthesized voice that sounds like something being reborn.
Of course, even with support, such a complete transformation is a difficult and frightening process to undertake, and the next two tracks are a sonic representation of this. "Not Okay" is a sub-two-minute tsunami of ear-splitting bass stabs, nauseatingly ominous synths, and choppy bursts of vocal samples, under the oppressive weight of which SOPHIE's whispered "I believe in you" is barely audible. Through this, we experience firsthand the helpless thrashing against a heavy current, the drifting further and further off from the safety of an outstretched hand at shore, the final exhausted surrendering to the water's pull. The subterranean sensation of sinking slowly into the cave-like depths at the bottom of the ocean is represented in "Pretending," a six-minute ambient piece. Its muffled, slow-motion grumblings are at first peaceful, almost lovely, but they slowly morph into moans and screeches and roars, the facade of beauty peeling away to reveal terror underneath.
At this, the album's bleakest and most hopeless moment, "Immaterial" arrives like a life raft, its thumping chorus a distant but steady heartbeat as it cuts through the murk to return us skyward. As a future bubblegum pop song that's more in line with Product than anything else here, it's deceptively lightweight in sound; in substance, it's the album's linchpin, condensing its recurring themes into one ultra-catchy package. If "It's Okay to Cry" is a pep talk to one's innermost self, "Immaterial" is that self fully-realized and ready to take on anything. There are clear parallels between the opener's lyrics and those in the bridge of "Immaterial," the pitch-shifted exuberance of which delivers a shot of pure euphoria. "I think your inside is your best side" in "It's Okay to Cry" is mirrored by the breathless admission, "I was just a lonely girl in the eyes of my inner child." And where "It's Okay to Cry" offers reassurance - "I don't even need to know your reasons/It's okay, it's okay, it's okay" - "Immaterial" issues a defiant battle cry: "I don't even have to explain/Just leave me alone now/I can't be held down."
In live performances, SOPHIE stands alongside Cecile Believe as she sings these lines, passionately lip-syncing along. It's hard not to view them in light of accusations of appropriating femininity leveled against her before it was publicly known that she's a woman and SOPHIE's reluctance to address them. Here, she insists that she doesn't owe society the explanations they demand. She doesn't have to prove anything to anyone but herself, and neither does anyone else. The dawning of this realization coincides, as in "Faceshopping," with a call to discard the everyday trappings of gender expectations and stereotypes for a freer and more enlightened existence. Even layers of biologically-imposed identity are shed - "Without my legs or my hair/Without my genes or my blood" - until the possibilities are literally endless: "With no name and with no type of story, where do I live?/Tell me, where do I exist?" Having reduced to nothingness the restrictions of the body one was born into, the expectations it creates also vanish into irrelevancy. In the whole new world erected in their place, there is finally freedom to exist "anyhow, any place, anywhere, anyone, any form, any shape, any way, anything I want."
However, the staggering nine-minute closer "Whole New World/Pretend World" is less a celebration and more an admission that this ideal is largely interior and mostly untenable in our current reality. This is made apparent in the buried lyrics of the verses, where SOPHIE inhabits "visions in my head" and "feelings in my skin" before "waking up wanting growth." Then, in a tone that's half conviction and half desperation, Cecile Believe belts, "I looked into your eyes/I thought that I could see a whole new world," and the accompanying shouts of "whole! new! world!" feel similarly desperate, particularly as the song progresses and the vocals begin to warp and disintegrate as the melody falls into shambles around them. With each repetition of the main synth line, there's a subtle tweak until it finally disappears in an all-consuming wash of white noise. There are many possible ways to interpret this, but it seems more in line with OIL's philosophy to understand it as a symbol of compromise rather than defeat, of modifying the ideal to make it workable in the here and now. This seems to match SOPHIE's personal point of view when she says, "The range of knowledge available to us is so confusing. But also it's surreal and it's ridiculous. I'm trying to get to a point where I can just embrace that feeling fully, as a human." From this perspective, OIL ends on an imperfect but hopeful note.
OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES is about the danger of adhering to a hierarchy of authenticity and using it to police or devalue self-expression, but it's also about how to break free of this restraining system. In a recent interview, SOPHIE expressed frustration at how "It's Okay to Cry" was received by media outlets that had previously held little regard for her work. "Do you have to sing a ballad crying for someone to take notice of something?" she asks. "Is that what emotion feels like to people? It doesn't feel like that to me." By expanding our perception of what it means to be with this album, SOPHIE simultaneously expands our perception of what it means to feel. Are the emotions accessed truer in "It's Okay to Cry" than in "Faceshopping" because one's a pretty, sappy ballad and the other's a cold, metallic banger? Is the sentiment more valid in "Is It Cold in the Water?" than in "Immaterial" because one's artfully brooding and the other's "cheap" and "mainstream?" Is SOPHIE herself any less genuine when she alters her appearance with prosthetics than when she does not? I think her answer to these questions would be a resounding no, if she even deigned to answer them at all. She might just as well tell everyone to enjoy the music for how it sounds and shut the hell up about any deeper meanings it could contain. Herein lies the beauty of it: just like each of us, it can be anything it wants, and every permutation is as bold and challenging and innovative as the last.
This piece was written with the utmost admiration and respect, but my own identity places limits on my ability and right to speak to certain things about trans identity and this album's relationship to it. As a supplement, I recommend reading Tiny Mix Tapes' review, which was written by a trans woman who has much more authority and experience to speak on the album's importance from that perspective than I ever will.
