Before her untimely death in 2021, SOPHIE had rebooted the possibilities of pop at least twice. First with a visionary run of singles that wriggled and sizzled into your brain like nothing else, but also with the occult-industrial complexity of Coil, the boundless glee of Missy Elliott, the impish troll value of prime Aphex Twin, and the clarion indomitable glamor of Rihanna. Second, with Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, a concise epic of humane transhumanism anthems, SOPHIE’s political and aural identities made flesh.

Then there were dozens, maybe hundreds of other tracks. Some were rumored for other artists or an album called Trans Nation. More were previewed on HEAV3N, the 2020 livestream that was set to raise funds for Black trans and queer femmes before getting inexplicably banned from Twitch and later uploaded to YouTube. Thickets were uploaded to various Reddit and YouTube channels of varying reliability. But SOPHIE was always working. When she died, her Oil follow-up was said by her family to be close enough to finished to have a final tracklisting. “All the layers within each song were already there in some form,” her brother and studio manager, Benny Long, told The New York Times. And so he and her family—in what must have been a heartbreaking, complex, and hopefully healing process—finished SOPHIE.

Here, then, is a unusually safe statement from one of the 21st century’s great risk-takers. In terms of sonic swerves, SOPHIE offers elegant integrations of the last 40 years of dance music into softer versions of her bang-whizz-zoom constructions; in terms of ideas, it leaves behind the body-mod complexity in favor of hard-won bodily pleasure. As a legacy product, it justly preserves these 16 songs, some of which are as good as anything she’s ever done. But it’s hard not to wonder if this is really it.

Part of the issue is structural. SOPHIE is roughly comprised of four sections of four tracks each, with the strangest works up front. The Badalamenti-esque “Intro (The Full Horror)” plumes into the blunted “RAWWWWWW” and then a pair of ambient/spoken word curiosities: “Plunging Asymptote” welds a phrase from multi-disciplinary artist Juliana Huxtable onto a brutal bit of machinery that threatens to lead the way into a new world like Drexciya, but doesn’t really go anywhere. There’s also the spacier “The Dome’s Protection,” in which Nina Kraviz intones some stuff about time travel which doesn’t quite dispel the specter of other things she’s said.

It’s tempting to imagine the sequencing as a queering of tradition, with an opening section of mostly noise and spoken-word sci-fi ruminations to preemptively drag any worries of “the difficult second album” syndrome. Yet it’s also structured in the standard dance music “big night out” mix, with an ambient beginning, vocal pop warmup, deep and drugged-out techno center, and blissed-out sendoff. Sophie could sequence in every sense of the word, but SOPHIE feels preprogrammed.

It’s a feeling reinforced by the grouping of various tracks made with the same collaborators. Maybe this is a way of emphasizing her belief in them; maybe it’s like a runway show, when a designer sends all the yellow dresses out together. Somehow, it sets them into competition. Take the second side’s bunch of BC Kingdom collabs. Each takes on the kind of syncopated organ base which has been a dance-pop building block since at least “Show Me Love.” “Reason Why” is the trap-pop version, “Live In My Truth” rings out with early 2000s R&B sass, and “Why Lies” brings a freestyle beat to the party.

Lined up in a row, you sort of just want to pull one off the stage with a big hook. “Live In My Truth” is all party-hearty aphorisms and, listen: The stakes of celebrating are too often life-and-death for queer, and especially trans, people. Sometimes we get eye-watering monuments to resilience and joy on a track like “Immaterial.” Here, it’s just a hand raising up a Solo cup. But the candy-coated joie de vivre of “Why Lies” is undeniable, with lyrics like “Please save the drama for your mama/And your daddy/And your granny” that are so dumb you just have to sing along. As for the glistening if sluggish “Reason Why” and Kim Petras’ “getting money like a DJ” line, not so much.

SOPHIE’s brother has said that the album’s techno center was largely created live, like a DJ making mixes. It sounds that way. If SOPHIE’s best work often played like it was beamed fully from her brain, tracks like “Elegance” and “One More Time,” both featuring Popstar, show their hand much more—their BPMs slide around, their beats crossfade, they represent the long tradition of knob twiddling. Tracks also look back: “Gallop” is a little gabba gem for the generations of girlies who won’t slow down, while “Berlin Nightmare” frets and struts like prime Green Velvet. I guess we’ll never know if these moments were her laying breadcrumbs of early influences on her path to somewhere new, or just the pleasure of remembering. Time will tell if any of them are as memorable as, say, “Ponyboy.”

But the closing set returns to some treasured partnerships, like getting home from the club and tumbling into bed with old friends. “Exhilarate” is a triumph of Kate Bush toms and fluttering vocal runs. “Always and Forever” flies Hannah Diamond’s sing-song melody into clouds pigmented with sunset tones, raindrop percussion, and dusky rumbles. It’s simple and eternal. Closer “Love Me Off Earth” swaps out, say, the fuschia vertigo of “ELLE” for rosegold floatation; it’s a kind of settling in, not settling for. And it’s fitting that the album’s best track boasts SOPHIE’s best collaborator, the hugely underrated singer and songwriter Cecile Believe. “My Forever” is a melancholy midtempo stunner, a bit of sophisti-pop with phrases that cleverly turn on their political implications. “Everybody wants to be somebody,” Believe sings. “Everybody’s got to own their body.” These days, neither is promised, and both are worth the fight.

If SOPHIE had lived, maybe there would be a way to hear the chorus without her. “I want to go back to forever,” Believe sings. Back, maybe, to a time whose endpoint wasn’t already determined. Maybe there would be a way to hear Believe sing “You’ll always be my forever” and not think she was singing to SOPHIE. Singing along to SOPHIE feels reverent, a way to reckon with a loss whose full scope we’ll never know. Another way to honor her legacy might be to make your own album from what she left behind, a hundred different records in a hundred different forms. To trouble the idea of a “final statement” the same way SOPHIE troubled pop. SOPHIE isn’t a third reboot; it’s more like a patch for an album undone. Now, it’s for the rest of us to get to work.