Into The Music
The internet’s memory is imperfect. Artists die, platforms disappear, and suddenly a body of work that shaped a generation becomes hard to find, poorly documented, or tangled up in misinformation. That’s the context behind WHOLENEW.WORLD, a new fan-led archive project dedicated to preserving and documenting the career of SOPHIE, the Scottish producer and artist who died in January 2021 after a fall at her home in Athens.
SOPHIE was 34. She had made music that genuinely didn’t sound like anything else: metallic, maximalist, cartoonishly extreme and at the same time emotionally devastating. Her work produced actual pop hits for Charli XCX and QT, and her solo records, particularly the 2018 album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, rewired what a lot of people thought pop music could be. She was also a trans woman who spoke openly about identity and authenticity in ways that resonated far beyond the music world. Her influence on the generation of artists working in hyperpop, experimental pop, and PC Music circles is essentially immeasurable.
None of that makes her well-documented. WHOLENEW.WORLD, which launched earlier this year and was reported on this week, is trying to fix that. The project is entirely unofficial and non-commercial, built by fans who want to create a comprehensive record of her live sets, official releases, photoshoots, and interviews. It also addresses something trickier: the misinformation that circulates around her unreleased and leaked material. The site will include information about that work without hosting it directly, which is a thoughtful line to walk.
The archive is explicitly seeking contributions from people who attended her performances, worked with her in any capacity, or have information about her early SoundCloud songs, many of which have become genuinely difficult to verify or find. Contact is open at archive@wholenew.world.
This kind of project matters more than it might seem at first glance. Music archival is uneven in the best of circumstances, and artists who operated primarily online, releasing early work on platforms that come and go, are especially vulnerable to losing that history. SOPHIE’s early work predates her mainstream visibility by several years. Getting that documented accurately, by people who were actually there for it, is the kind of work that doesn’t happen unless someone makes it happen deliberately.
There is something poignant about a community coming together to preserve the record of an artist who was herself obsessed with transformation, with becoming more fully herself, with pushing past what things were supposed to sound like or feel like. WHOLENEW.WORLD is not going to capture everything. No archive does. But the impulse behind it, the determination that this work should be remembered carefully and accurately, feels right for the artist it honors.
For fans who want to contribute or just see what’s been assembled so far, the site is at wholenew.world.
This hit me somewhere deep. I think about how music can just vanish, not slowly but suddenly, platform gone, links dead, and this whole world that shaped you becomes something you can only half-describe to people. SOPHIE’s music reached me at a moment I wasn’t expecting to be reached. The idea that a community is fighting to make sure that doesn’t get lost the way so much gets lost, it really matters. Thank you to everyone doing that work.
There is something about the fragility of a body of work that lives only in digital spaces, you can feel it like a tide pulling at sand. SOPHIE made music that was like nothing else, all sharp edges and impossible softness at once. The fans preserving this are doing something sacred, honestly. Memory is the first thing that disappears and the last thing we can afford to lose.
YES this is exactly the kind of fan energy that deserves recognition!! Gqom fans in South Africa have been doing this same work for years, building our own archives because nobody outside was going to do it for us. The fact that SOPHIE’s community is stepping up like this is beautiful. Artists who push boundaries deserve to be remembered properly, not just in a Wikipedia stub.
Reading this, I had to stop and breathe for a second. I grew up with my mom’s old cassette tapes of Polish folk music, half of them warped and barely playable, and losing access to something you love is its own kind of grief. SOPHIE’s music deserves to last. So grateful these fans are doing this work.
“The internet’s memory is imperfect” got me. I’ve had that exact feeling, searching for a track you know changed you and hitting a wall of dead links and deleted accounts. SOPHIE deserved better from the platforms. At least the fans are showing up for her.
What we are witnessing here is something with deep historical roots. Think of the Nestorian scribes who copied manuscripts by hand across centuries, preserving texts that no institution cared enough to protect. SOPHIE’s work represents a similar kind of rupture, music that genuinely broke with what came before it, and the fans building this archive understand intuitively that ruptures get lost if no one tends to them. This is devotion in its truest form, and it deserves far more attention than it gets.