OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES
There had always been a burning sense of resistance baked into SOPHIE’s experimental soundscapes, which simultaneously honored and rejected the tropes and rules of mainstream pop. But the Scottish producer’s visionary debut album is an exhilarating escalation—a work that not only exploded expectations around song structure and form but conventional notions of gender, identity, and self, as well. *Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides* is sweeping and defiant, pinballing from glitchy rave cuts (“Ponyboy”) to ethereal pop elegies (“It’s Okay to Cry”) to ambient passages that feel practically spiritual (“Pretending”). Each left turn is an invitation to slip further into SOPHIE’S neon universe. In the hands of any other artist, such dizzying digital distortions would appear to warp reality. Here, though, they clarify it. Every synthetic vocal, slithering synth, zigzagging beat, and gleefully warped sample brings us closer to SOPHIE\'S truth. Some of the project’s headiest questions—those about body, being, and soul—seem to rest on a distant horizon the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to yet. “Immaterial,” a fizzing, maximalist hat-tip to Madonna, moves the goalposts even further, proposing a version of consciousness in which the material world is, in fact, only the beginning.
The experimental music of SOPHIE relaxes into new forms on her debut album. It is sprawling and beautiful, while still keeping the disorienting, latex-pop feel of her fascinating production technique.
More than just proving SOPHIE’s aptitude as a producer - and lets be real, she’s one of this decade’s leading pioneers - ‘Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides’ digs deeper.
SOPHIE tackles notions of gender head-on with her challenging, cathartic debut LP
The UK producer's debut album hurls the listener through an uncanny valley of sonic possibilities
Considering SOPHIE's influence on electronic and pop music in the 2010s, it's hard to believe that Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides is only the producer's debut album.
Modern pop music is rife with ultra-clear production and the most earwormy melodies and choruses. There are, however, certain artists who ta...
PC Music acolyte SOPHIE has always been more concerned with texture and consumerism than melody and emotion, so it’s startling that
Themes of acceptance, connection and transformation come into place on producer SOPHIE's album ‘Oil of Every Pearls Un-Insides’.
From new ways with trance to big ballads and J-pop elements, Sophie’s fantastic debut gilds a unique aesthetic
Sophie - Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides review: high concept low dividends all ambition no fun