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**SOPHIE - Product ★★★★☆**

In an era where electronic music had seemingly exhausted its capacity to shock, along came a Glasgow-born producer with a penchant for candy-coloured chaos and a mission to weaponise pop music. SOPHIE's debut compilation "Product" didn't just arrive in 2015 – it detonated, scattering fragments of hyper-compressed beats and sugar-rush melodies across the musical landscape like shrapnel from a glitter bomb.

The album's genesis traces back to SOPHIE's early singles that had been percolating through underground channels since 2013. Tracks like "Bipp" and "Lemonade" had already established her as something of an enigma – a faceless producer crafting impossibly pristine pop confections that felt simultaneously innocent and sinister. By the time "Product" crystallised these experiments into a cohesive statement, SOPHIE had become the whispered name among those in the know, the secret ingredient in PC Music's avant-garde recipe.

What SOPHIE conjured was nothing short of alchemical. Taking the building blocks of commercial pop – the four-four kicks, the saccharine hooks, the glossy production – she subjected them to extreme compression and digital manipulation until they resembled pop music viewed through a funhouse mirror. This was hyperreality made audible, each element pushed beyond its natural breaking point until it achieved an almost violent beauty.

The opening salvo of "Bipp" remains one of the most arresting album openers of the decade. Built around a vocal sample that chirps "I can make you feel better" with the persistence of a malfunctioning toy, it's both irresistibly catchy and deeply unsettling. The track's rubber-ball bassline bounces with manic energy while crystalline synths create a sonic environment that feels like being trapped inside a computer game designed by someone who's never experienced human emotion.

"Lemonade" pushes this aesthetic even further into the red. Its central motif – a grotesquely pitch-shifted vocal declaring "lemonade, l-l-lemonade" – sounds like capitalism's death rattle transformed into a nursery rhyme. The production is so aggressively compressed it seems to exist in a permanent state of digital suffocation, yet somehow remains utterly addictive. It's pop music as psychological warfare, designed to lodge itself in your brain and refuse extraction.

The album's centrepiece, "Hard," strips the concept down to its brutal essence. Built around nothing but kicks, claps, and that relentless vocal hook, it's minimalism taken to masochistic extremes. The track's six-minute runtime tests the listener's endurance, yet its hypnotic power is undeniable. Here, SOPHIE revealed her true genius – the ability to create something simultaneously repulsive and magnetic.

Not every experiment succeeds entirely. "Msmsmsm" ventures into more abstract territory that occasionally feels more like an intellectual exercise than an emotional experience, while "Vyzee" pushes the aesthetic so far into the digital realm that it risks losing human connection altogether. Yet even these more challenging moments serve the album's greater purpose – to completely recalibrate our expectations of what pop music can be.

The closing trilogy of "Just Like We Never Said Goodbye," "Vyzee," and the title track "Elle" provides a surprisingly tender conclusion to this digital assault course. Here, SOPHIE's manipulations feel less violent, more like gentle caresses applied to familiar pop structures. It's as if she's showing us that behind all the aggression lies a genuine affection for the forms she's deconstructing.

"Product" arrived at a crucial moment in pop's evolution, when the lines between mainstream and underground were becoming increasingly blurred. SOPHIE's influence can now be heard everywhere – from Charli XCX's experimental pop adventures to the digital maximalism of artists like 100 gecs. The album essentially created a new language for pop music, one where artificiality wasn't something to be hidden but celebrated, where the digital glitches weren't bugs but features.

Eight years later, "Product" still sounds like a transmission from pop music's future – a future that we're only now beginning to inhabit. SOPHIE tragically passed away in 2021, but her vision of pop as a malleable, infinitely manipulable art form has become the new orthodoxy. "Product" wasn't just an album; it was a manifesto written in compressed beats and candy-coloured chaos, and its reverberations continue to reshape