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Music

Climb Inside SOPHIE’s Beautiful, Decadent Debut Album

'Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides' is full of intense, extraterrestrial production and lyrics that will make you feel things.
Daisy Jones
London, GB
SOPHIE album artwork

The most awe-inspiring thing that exists is surely space. All of it. The cavernous grey swell of Jupiter. The burning blue body of Neptune. The stars that blink at you from a distance, and then roar with fire up close. All that velvet blackness pressed up against so much colour. The cosmos is an inhuman entity, but it’s also charged with feeling. It’s a sea of contradictions and mystery.

SOPHIE’s debut album arrived today, and it sounds like its been crafted from the recesses of space in that you could describe it in the same way. At 39 minutes long, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides is awash with texture and colour and emotions that expand and contract. Whether she’s singing the kind of words that make your stomach contract because they’re so vulnerable in “It’s Okay to Cry” (“I hope you don't take this the wrong way / But I think your inside is your best side”) or throwing out a glistening falsetto in lieu of words on “Infatuation” or building an intense wall of industrial synth that somehow sounds joyous instead of jarring on “Whole New World/Pretend World”, the Scottish producer has presented us with a beautiful, complex gift.

There hasn’t been enough time to fully appreciate what this album is – or what it could be. So climb inside it below, give it time, bury yourself within the pinks and blues and purples, soak up each synth line and unexpected, artful lyric. Like the cosmos that exists beyond the earth, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides could be endless.

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