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**★★★★☆**

In an era where electronic music often feels sanitised and predictable, SOPHIE's debut album arrives like a sugar-rush meteor crash-landing in your living room. *Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides* is a kaleidoscopic fever dream that sounds like the future eating itself – equal parts beautiful and terrifying, synthetic yet deeply human.

The Glasgow-born producer had already established herself as pop music's most thrilling saboteur long before this 2018 full-length landed. Her early singles – the squelchy chaos of "Bipp," the industrial bubblegum of "Lemonade" – felt like transmissions from some parallel universe where Top 40 radio had been hijacked by avant-garde pranksters. Working behind the scenes with everyone from Charli XCX to Madonna, SOPHIE had spent years perfecting her signature sound: hyperreal, plasticky textures that somehow felt more emotionally honest than traditional instrumentation.

But nothing quite prepared listeners for the scope and ambition of *Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides*. This is hyperpop as high art, a 38-minute journey through landscapes that shift from tender vulnerability to full-scale sonic assault without warning. The album opens with "It's Okay To Cry," a moment of startling intimacy that finds SOPHIE's own voice floating over crystalline synths like morning dew on chrome. It's a mission statement disguised as a lullaby: permission to feel everything at maximum intensity.

From there, the record becomes increasingly unhinged in the most delightful way possible. "Ponyboy" transforms BDSM imagery into a pounding techno anthem that sounds like being inside a washing machine during an earthquake. The title track builds from ambient whispers into a towering cathedral of distorted bass, each element fighting for space in the mix until the whole thing threatens to collapse under its own weight. It's maximalism as meditation, chaos as catharsis.

The album's genius lies in how it balances extremes. For every moment of punishing intensity like "Faceshopping" – a brutal deconstruction of identity and image that sounds like robots having an existential crisis – there's something like "Is It Cold In The Water?," where SOPHIE's processed vocals drift over relatively gentle synth washes like a digital ghost searching for connection. These quieter interludes don't provide relief so much as different types of overwhelm.

"Immaterial" stands as perhaps the album's most perfect distillation of SOPHIE's vision: a euphoric pop song about transcending physical form that somehow manages to be both completely artificial and deeply spiritual. When SOPHIE sings "I could be anything I want," it feels like both promise and threat, liberation and dissolution. It's the kind of song that makes you want to dance and cry simultaneously, often within the same bar.

The production throughout is nothing short of revolutionary. SOPHIE treats sound like sculpture, crafting textures that seem to exist in three dimensions. Bass lines don't just drop – they seem to physically manifest in the room. Percussion hits with the impact of falling anvils. Even the album's gentler moments possess an uncanny valley quality that keeps listeners slightly off-balance. This is music that demands to be felt as much as heard.

The record's impact on contemporary pop cannot be overstated. In the five years since its release, *Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides* has spawned countless imitators and influenced everyone from 100 gecs to Arca. The hyperpop movement that SOPHIE helped birth has become the sound of Gen Z's digital anxiety, all pitched vocals and compressed emotions. Yet none of her disciples have matched the emotional depth she achieved here – the way she made synthetic sounds feel more human than humanity itself.

Tragically, SOPHIE's death in 2021 at just 34 transformed this album from artistic statement into memorial. Listening now, songs like "It's Okay To Cry" carry additional weight, her message of radical self-acceptance feeling both more urgent and more precious. The album stands as testament to an artist who refused to accept limitations – of genre, of gender, of what music could be or do.

*Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides* remains a singular achievement: an album that sounds like nothing else while pointing toward everything music might become. It's essential listening for anyone interested in pop's bleeding edge, a beautiful catastrophe that continues revealing new layers with each encounter. In SOPHIE's hands, the future never sounded so inviting or so strange.