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Sep 4, 2018While SOPHIE's music has never been simple, Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides' complexities and transformations make it a remarkable debut album that reveals more with each listen.
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The WireAug 8, 2018From its cryptic title to its discombobulating assemblage of stylistic approaches in the track listing, Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides is chaotic and disjointed. ... Bringing a range of seemingly contrasting elements together, SOPHIE has been problematising commonly accepted binaries since dropping the berserk dance pop of “BIPP” on Glasgow’s Numbers label in 2013. [Sep 2018, p.49]
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UncutJul 19, 2018SOPHIE effortlessly crosses detailed, quartz-like avant-garde production with pop's unapologetic, dizzying sugar rush. [Sep 2018, p.39]
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Jul 12, 2018In SOPHIE's most intimate work yet, she subverts pop motifs into the catchiest form of self-assertion, reminding us all of why pop music still matters.
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Jun 20, 2018Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides does not remove all mystery, but is a powerful statement of identity, a shattering of traditional genre boundaries and nuanced, moving expressions of emotion where there once was an inscrutable deadpan. The fact that it all sounds so irresistibly good is the icing on the cake.
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Jun 20, 2018OIL’s resonance and bravery--underlined by its acutely mapped volatile and enrapturing production--is inspiring, and the conception and execution of its testimony remarkable.
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Jun 19, 2018This is the kind of music that, in 20 years, we may look back on as a pivotal point in changing the trajectory of the pop music sound.
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Jun 19, 2018As is often the case with PC Music-affiliated works, this is an album which displays, and not infrequently, extraordinary flashes of inspired production work, but can descend into tedium with as much suddenness. ... And when the whole affair does eventually draw to a close with the hum of an air conditioner and the sound of the flying Jony Ive heroine thing from Wall-E, you will probably give an audible sigh of relief. And then spin the whole album again.
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Jun 18, 2018Sophie combines sweet pop melodies and sounds with absolutely hideous noise--grinding, clanking, blaring, burbling, blurting, unpleasant and jarring sounds, wildly autotuned voices--to create a form of pop music that, if not entirely new, may never before have been presented in such extreme fashion.
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Jun 18, 2018Crossing boundaries of pop music and chasing transcendence, SOPHIE achieves the rare feat of making abstract, difficult electronic music that hits you straight in the heart.
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Jun 18, 2018SOPHIE manages to incorporate the personal without detracting from what set her apart in the first place, and it makes for a record that’s as affecting as it is thrilling.
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Jun 18, 2018A personal triumph that continues her revamping of what pop means today. Its contents show a trajectory from acts like Art of Noise into ‘90s pop and Eurodance to today’s droning and experimental music by acts such as Lotic.
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Q MagazineJun 15, 2018Whatever she make you feel, it's a ferociously sensual work. [Summer 2018, p.117]
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Jun 15, 2018Packed with more than enough ideas to constitute what’s still ostensibly a “debut album,” OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES pushes new limits of bombast only to settle into the same sort of razor-sharp, high-concept pop that’s worked for SOPHIE since the beginning.
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Jun 15, 2018Despite software advances, so many electronic producers are content to lapse into nostalgia or a safe, compromised emotional range; Sophie has crafted a genuinely original sound and uses it to visit extremes of terror, sadness and pleasure.
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Jun 15, 2018“It’s Okay To Cry,” “Ponyboy,” and “Faceshopping,” open the album in that order balancing SOPHIE’s pop instincts with her weirder ones. “Faceshopping” is a highlight, both visceral and compulsively listenable, using Photoshop as a metaphor for becoming more comfortable with her body.
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Jun 15, 2018Fractured, inconsistent, broken, torn, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES aims toward the stylistic grandness of High Pop, and in that inconsistence, it achieves it. ... It’s incredible.
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Jun 15, 2018She definitely goes further than Aguilera in tracks like “Ponyboy,” with a harsh beat that conjures smashed glass, or “Whole New World/Pretend World,” which stretches past the nine-minute mark. ... Yet the lyrics favor abstract concepts over intimate confessions; Sophie ponders consumerism in “Faceshopping” (“My face is the front of shop / My face is the real shop front”) and the power dynamics of sex in “Ponyboy.” Then there’s “Immaterial,” which feels like the key to apprehending this fascinating album.
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Jun 15, 2018By complicating the naturalness of the human voice and corrupting established pop structures, SOPHIE also complicates the supposed naturalness of gender, which has always been inextricable from music. Her work is a sphere where will and impulse take priority over fate and legacy.
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Jun 15, 2018Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, SOPHIE's first proper album, presents her artistic vision in a purer form than anything she's done before. It is at times unapologetically poppy, beginning with the opening power ballad, "It's Okay To Cry." But it's also utterly, defiantly weird, flouting conventions of rhythm, composition and, perhaps most of all, taste.
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Jun 15, 2018Her first solo album shows that there are even more sides to this virtual-insanity innovator.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 231 out of 260
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Mixed: 9 out of 260
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Negative: 20 out of 260
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Jun 15, 2018
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Jun 15, 2018
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Oct 1, 2019