SOPHIE: Earthly Pleasures

But question marks have hovered over SOPHIE from the start. Through her affiliation with PC Music figurehead A.G. Cook, who collaborated with her on music for QT – a tongue-in-cheek pop avatar with a kink for caffeinated drinks – SOPHIE caught some of the flak directed at the divisive producer collective. This isn’t serious music, levelled the PC Music haters, who seemed anxious not to be duped by these confusing corporate sellouts. In one early interview, SOPHIE described the genre of her music as “advertising”; a year later, she storm-proofed her burgeoning career with the spoils of a McDonald’s commercial which used Lemonade as its soundtrack. Her provenance was mysterious, too. She has avoided giving out biographical information – though PC Music stans have dug up evidence of her former band, an electro-punk outfit called Motherland (clips still survive on YouTube, for the curious).

There was also the question of her gender identity. Though she had only ever offered the name “SOPHIE” in promotional material, without specifying pronouns, many listeners understood her to be a male producer working behind a female alias – a perception alloyed by interviews in the New York Times and Rolling Stone. Watching the videos for It’s Okay To Cry and the next single Ponyboy, where a ponytailed SOPHIE thrusts and struts in unison with New York performance duo FlucT, it becomes clear that we’re witnessing a high-stakes reveal for a previously camera-shy artist. The third single, Faceshopping, makes the point explicit: “My face is the front of shop,” runs the hook, as spoken by Cecile Believe, also known as solo artist Mozart’s Sister, who appears throughout the new album and stage show. The verse speaks to the thrill of engineered enhancement: “Artificial bloom, hydroponic skin, chemical release, synthesise the real.” In SOPHIE’s cyborg universe, fake is no longer a category.

In person, SOPHIE is surprisingly straightforward. Softly but carefully spoken, and framed by a triangular wedge of auburn curls, her face is porcelain-clear and Pre-Raphaelite pretty; her cheekbones aren’t quite the prosthetic Everest’s modelled in the videos, but they’re not far off, either. We meet in Soho the day before she unveils her new stage show at Heaven, her first live performance in London.

“People have commented at shows that it’s a very young, queer audience,” she tells me, and it’s younger fans who seem to engage most deeply with her music. They don’t have the same hang-ups about sincerity, she thinks; their relative lack of context means they don’t hear her avant-garde sound design as anything other than pop. More than that, “people write to me quite often and tell me the music has played a genuine reassuring and life-giving role in their lives, or whatever they’re going through. So if I can do that, those are the people I care about, and I don’t care about the other people who are going to look at things in a bitchy, annoying way, basically,” she laughs.

The show is a juggernaut: elongated by platform boots and a swinging ponytail, SOPHIE becomes a mile-high fantasy object, shrink-wrapped in latex as she lip-syncs lyrics and wheels her synth on a hostess trolley. She’s flanked by Cecile Believe, who play-acts the ditzy karaoke diva, and FlucT dancers Sigrid Lauren and Monica Mirabile, who accentuate the flesh-and-blood reality of their bodies by hoisting each other around the floor, mouths agape. It’s raw and sexy, but winkingly artificial too.

At one point, SOPHIE’s performance is interrupted by a sequence of lasers synced to synapse-scything electronics. It’s a harsh contrast to the show’s other memorable highlight, Immaterial Girl, a track as effervescent as anything she’s produced for British pop star Charli XCX, her frequent collaborator. The title flashes on the video screen, before shrinking down to “material”. In this slick gesture, SOPHIE telescopes her opposing obsessions into one: real and fake, human and machine, organic and synthetic.