Inspiration can strike anywhere — something that Empress Of learned during a night out at a strip club. 

The singer/songwriter and L.A. native returned to the studio the next morning, raring to work that energy into her new album. "I came into the studio, like, ‘Guys, I went to a strip club. I gave a beautiful woman money. That is the energy for today,’" she says with a laugh. "Almost to a fault, everything can be an inspiration." Her upcoming album, the ecstatic For Your Consideration (due March 22), was spurred by that type of sultry stimulus and winks knowingly at the seductive glitz of her Hollywood home.

Born Lorely Rodriguez, Empress Of debuted in 2015 with the sublime Me and has since perfected a formula of avant pop songwriting, high-energy electronic textures, and bold poetics across two further albums. But a distinct change powers For Your Consideration, in part powered by a surreal heartbreak: the press release accompanying the album’s announcement details having been broken up with by a film director, only to wind up bombarded by his "For Your Consideration" campaign for the Oscars. 

As such, For Your Consideration embraces the strengths of her first three records, while bringing a renewed immediacy to every facet. The house and R&B influences are distilled to their essence on some tracks, while others lavish in lush experimental pop. Lyrically, Rodriguez opts for raw, sensual tales of love, lust, and loss — sung in both Spanish and English. 

Nearing the release of For Your Consideration, Empress Of spoke with GRAMMY.com about finding inspiration from Raya dates and early ‘00s club music, losing your naivety, and finding her Lady Gaga transformation.

As an L.A. native, how has your perception of the entertainment industry shifted over the last few years? Was that something that had any impact on the way that you grew up and envisioned your future?

It's funny, I never saw L.A. as "the stars" and all that. But on this record, I'm embracing that L.A., or embracing that side of myself. I see "For Your Consideration" billboards everywhere. And now I'll have a "For Your Consideration" next year. But it’ll be like, "For your consideration: For Your Consideration." I think it's funny. I'm poking fun at it on this album. 

I don't think I've ever been so lighthearted with my album art and how I promote myself. I've always felt like an "indie darling." Maybe a little serious. And here I'm like 10 years into doing this, this is my fourth album, and I'm like, Let's ride a shooting star over Los Angeles. Let's be her. Let's send the message, and the message is she's a shooting star.

It feels as if you're introducing another side of yourself within this almost satirical and intensely contemporary conception of "the artist." It’s as if you needed to build to this level of poking fun, and now you’re comfy enough to.

For sure. And I think confidence is something you hear on the album. Even just working with this photographer, she was like, "If we're going to do this…you need to give me camp. You need to give me laughing, throwing your head back." 

I couldn't be serious on this album cover. And what I love about that is like, yes, I take my career very seriously, but I also am having a laugh at how absurd it is what we do.

I think there's a big misconception in art that you have to be stoic when you’re theorizing and contextualizing. The signs of having fun can actually be much stronger than projecting something more intense.

I think it's like you said: I'm comfortable. And there's also something when you speak about an album that you know is good. There might've been other times in my career where I was not as assured in something, like maybe I was doing something new. But even on this record, I'm doing something new. I worked with tons of producers and songwriters and all that, but I know it's a good album. If I didn't make it, I would want to listen to it.

You did work with some incredible songwriters for the album. There's never a moment where I hear something and think it sounds unlike you or out of place.

Age is confidence. And being older and having done four albums now, I just don't really doubt anything. I don't think I've compromised or was in a situation where a producer was pushing too much of themselves on a song. I feel like I was a very good leader on this album where even though I wasn't at the laptop or making the beats or whatever, I was able to convey what I wanted to make.

I agree with you about age — I know when I was young I would push myself and had this strange confidence because I was naïve! But as you grow older, you see a more complex picture. Thematically, does it feel like this captures that romantic, cyclical sense of longing and then having and then losing? 

Totally. You have that naive confidence when you're younger. When you're older, you have confidence about not caring anymore. Naiveness turns into "I don't give a f—." That is even more power in itself. 

The romantic themes and feminine themes on the record, the themes about wanting to be wanted and wanting to feel good, but being okay with letting it go — a lot of the lyrics are just a little bit more direct than I would have ever said them. An earlier me would drown it in metaphor. And I don't feel like I'm drowned in metaphor. It's like who I am right now. If you went on a date with me, I wouldn't be trying to present a version of myself that you would like. You would just get me. 

A lot of these songs were written with me using [the dating app] Raya for the first time and going on dates. [Laughs.] It's weird. It helps with when you're writing songs, because I'm tired of presenting a version of myself that someone can understand. Either you get it or you don't.

 But getting there takes a lot of sifting through your own personal crap doesn’t it? 

Oh my God. Yeah. There was a 27-year-old version of me that was like, [nervous muttering]. And now I'm just kind of like, "Yes, there's a lot of intention and a lot of art direction, vision, but to me it feels less safe, and I like that."

I feel like there's a sweet spot in an artist's career when they become less safe. And I have seen it before in other artists and I'm like, Cool. This is an evolution for you. I don't know if I'm quite there. I don't know if I'm at the Lady Gaga point of less safe, but I feel like it takes time.

I was struck by the level of detail you went into in the runup to the album, talking about the heartbreak you experienced with a film director. Do you feel like being that direct and transparent helped you just push past it and move through it instead of getting stuck in metaphors?

Everyone always loves my breakup songs. I get so many comments from fans being like, "Your song got me through my breakup." The song I have with Muna, "What's Love," is a breakup song — a "breakup song but I'm not broken." It feels like my "thank u, next." Like, yes, I'm heartbroken, but I learned so much in it.

Completely. And now you can really go and sing it to the masses and have the story be your triumph. Does that ever get uncomfy, though, having people run up to you like, "I loved your most painful traumatic moment!"

No — once music is out, it belongs to people, and it's up to them for interpretation. If I broke up with someone or if I was mourning someone and had to go and play this song about them on tour, it would be difficult. But when I sing the songs, they kind of feel like someone else's songs. When I’m on tour and I sing my songs, it's like I'm singing a song that I added to my playlist.

How far into the writing and concepting did you get before you started working with someone like Rina Sawayama or Muna?

I wrote a lot of these songs during a summer, and then going into fall, going into sessions, I knew I wanted to start everything with my voice. I feel like the voice is the most important instrument. No matter what producer or songwriters, I was like, "Can you just turn the microphone on, and can I just beatbox and hum and sing, and we just chop it up and make some world?" 

I was like, "I just want to write hot songs. I want to write horny songs. I want to write fun songs. I want to be on stage and I want to be sexy and I want to evoke this sensuality." And so when I was writing, I was just like, "Okay, how can we make it horny?" 

That’s so fun, especially because you’re doing it by being unapologetically dedicated to what you needed in that moment.

I wrote these songs over two years, but I definitely remember being in the studio and coming up with ideas with these songwriters and just being like, "How can we make it hot? I just want to feel hot."

There’s this incredible duality to your music that makes me think of artists like Björk — this ability to bounce between really lux, almost ballad-y melodies, and then you can get really club-ready. And then, you've got some electronic textures. Who were your influences here, and how did you go about harnessing that wide spectrum so cohesively?

I was listening to a lot of music from the early 2000s. I was listening to this band called Koop, and their album Waltz for Koop which has Yukimi Nagano on it. I was listening to Des’ree’s "You Gotta Be. I was listening to the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, with the Cardigans. I was listening to a lot of Pharrell and the Neptunes. I always listen to Saint Etienne. I just love the sexiness of being in a club in the early 2000s.

I was struck by how much singing in Spanish was emphasized on this album. Was that something you set out to do at the outset of the record?

On your fourth album, you’re like, How else can I make this exciting for myself? I’ve never written this much music on an album in Spanish. And I wanted to write with co-writers who write in Spanish. 

Just being in the room with them and thinking of themes and song titles that go with that flirty sexiness, like "Sucia" which means dirty, and "Fácil" which means easy, and "Preciosa" which means precious. It’s so fun. It made writing this album so exciting for me. For "Preciosa," the night before I had gone to a strip club and I came into the studio, like, "Guys, I went to a strip club. I gave a beautiful woman money. That is the energy for today. Let’s write a song." [Laughs.] 

Almost to a fault, everything can be an inspiration, whether it’s being objectified as a woman or being heartbroken or being on a Raya date and having a one-night stand. I hate and love that everything turns into a song.

After 9 Years, Ana Tijoux Returns With Songs At The BPM Of Life

Tones And I used to perform in a completely vulnerable state—alone, afterhours on the streets of Byron Bay, surrounded by soused barcrawlers. "On the street, I put myself in positions where, in the middle of the night, drunk and disorderly people are everywhere," the singer/songwriter born Toni Watson tells GRAMMY.com over Zoom. "And still, no one has yelled or said profanities like they do online."

How could this be possible? It's called deindividuation—when people join up with mobs, they do things they wouldn't do alone. This goes triple for social media, where you can pick any name you want and replace your face with a pickup truck avatar. Under cover of anonymity, these types have tormented Tones And I to the point of sending death threats, prompting fear for her family.

"I just feel like it's getting to the point where a whole bunch of artists are going to start talking about it," she says. "It's a good thing to bring up. We have a voice."

Tones And I uses her voice in two ways—her literal one calls attention to Instagram vultures and her musical one sings about her deepest fears, joys and anxieties. Those feelings permeate her new album, Welcome To The Madhouse, which was released July 16. Its songs, like "Fly Away," "Fall Apart" and "Dark Waters"—which she wrote at various points in her life—paint a complicated portrait.

With all her challenges in the music business, does the good still outweigh the bad for Tones And I? Find her answer below—along with ruminations on her busking past, losing a loved one and overcoming hatred to find peace.

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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Nice to meet you. Where are you located?

I'm back in Byron Bay, where I used to busk.

What was in your repertoire?

"Dance Monkey," actually. I played that for almost a year before I released it. I was never going to release it. That and four other originals. The rest was a bit of Disclosure, a lot of Chet Faker.

Usually, when you busk, you go for something a 65-year-old in flip-flops might know. I respect the more obscure choices.

Yeah, also, I busked with synthesizers and loop pedals, so it wasn't your typical [setup]. 

One time, the whole power in the town went out and none of the buskers were connected to the powerpoints in the stores. I was the only busker that kept going. Everyone flooded into the streets and had to get out of the buildings because the power was out in town. The whole road was full with a thousand people and no one could see anything. The girls were holding their phone lights over my keyboard to keep playing. Everyone was singing "Hey Ya!" in the street. It was sick.

What was it like to watch your breakout hit grow from a busking environment?

Yeah, it was insane. Crazy.

I used to do this cover of "Forever Young" [by Alphaville] and every time I played it, people would get up and start dancing. I wanted a song that was my own that you could dance to, so originally, I just wrote that song for my friends. I didn't even want to release music, to be honest. I didn't think there was anything good from releasing music because I didn't know any better. I just wanted to busk.

Tell me about the palette of colors you used for Welcome To The Madhouse—the inspirations behind its making.

That's really hard. I've always said that every song I write is inspired by some mood or even another song, but this album was definitely not a mood for me.

The fact that it's turned into a nicely wrapped box with a bonnet because I called it Welcome To The Madhouse and the music is depressed, happy then sad—I made it like that so it would all fit into that album nicely, but the reason is it was also written over the last two years. 

I've got songs from when I first got to Byron Bay, before I started busking, when I started busking, when I went on my first world tour and when [my friend] passed away. It was from such different times that there's no way this album was going to be one mood, or one time in my life.

When I wrote "Fly Away," the lyrics were so genuinely honest to how I was feeling. It could be quite sad, but I wanted to have a moment in that song where it felt really happy and very up-and-about and made you feel good. But, if you want to listen to it properly, you can listen to the slower version where I took that production out. It can show you that there's a really sad side to the song. It became my good friend's funeral song when he passed away.

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My condolences. Can I ask what happened?

So, we'd all just gone away together because we had this tiny little moment in Australia where there was no COVID. We got back and we were at the beach all day for one of our good friend's birthdays. That morning, I got a call at 6 a.m. He drove into a pole and flung through the windshield and hit the road and died.

I'm OK with talking about it because people like to pretend online that he did it to himself. They don't know what's going on, so I guess maybe if I just say it once, people will understand that it was nothing like that. He was an amazing, happy person and he got into a car accident.

That's absolutely awful. Tell me about him in life, though. What kind of a person was he? What did he mean to you?

Well, he was probably the one in the group that brought everyone together—the girls and the boys. He was the loudest one, but in the nicest way. He wasn't rude or obnoxious. He was fair to everyone. He never got involved in anything if anyone was having any arguments. He wasn't just the closest one to the younger ones, like us, but also the parents. There are a lot of different places around his world that are really significantly hurt by this. He's got such a good heart.

Anyway, I met him probably 10 to 12 years ago, growing up. He's dealt with a lot in that time. His dad passed away. His brother's got cerebral palsy, so at the moment, I'm housing his brother. I've got his brother in a place where he can live on his own because he told me before he died that was one thing he wanted to do—to get his brother out of his grandparents' house because they were getting too old to deal with it.

It's a weird balance between expressing yourself and making a commercial product. How did your response to this translate into the tunes?

Well, there was a period where I originally tried to write songs about the person that he was, but that was too hard for me. So, when I wrote "Fall Apart," I wrote about the fact that we can't really deal with it yet in the way I wanted to. I tried the way I wanted to talk about him and who he was with the world in the music, which is the way a lot of musicians would talk.

I tried to talk about him, but I couldn't. So, I wrote "Fall Apart," which is really about how much we miss him and we're thinking about him.

People online were saying his death was his own fault? What's wrong with them?

There's a lot of stuff online, especially when I release anything. Online sucks. It brings people to a place where they don't know what happened, so they just create a story. Everyone does. If you don't give people enough information, they're going to create a story.

The story was that he was sad. [Beneath] the photos we would put up remembering him, they would say things like "Look how sad he looks!" and all that. I [even had to] convince his mom that he was a happy person. I'm trying to tell his mom, who wants more clarity, that he was a really happy person. I had to lock down that he would never do that.

Do you deal with other types of online bullying outside of your friend?

The fact that you ask makes me feel really good, because I thought I was famously known for it. It's really bad. I'm off social media, which sucks. Being a new artist, you're excited. It's so hard. You want to be authentic. Sometimes, it does affect you a little bit when there's whole, huge videos on their YouTube accounts about you. They also make them about other artists, too.

I need to realize, at the end of the day, it feels like it's always me because I am me. But there are other people, too. There are so many people who are going through it. It's just that I am me. I'm upset about things that happen to me. But when I see someone say something about another artist, I'm automatically really frustrated toward that person because it's absolutely freaking horrible. It's not about me for a second.

Tones And I. Photo: Giulia McGauran​

Speaking stranger-to-stranger, I don't think you "need" to do anything in response. This is a cruel environment. The onus is on online bullies to cease their behavior, not on you.

Thanks for saying that. It makes me feel better. I just don't want my family—my nana and pa—to see that. They're so proud of me when I see them and I would never share that stuff with them. And now, they see it and it's so sad. I don't want my papa to see that stuff online and my nana. It gets pretty outrageous. I keep my head down. I talk about what I care about, but I don't go on comments and stuff. If I looked for it, I'd probably not come out of the house.

The reason I decided to become a busker and not a YouTube artist is that I wanted to play live. I wanted to play on the street. On the street, I put myself in positions where, in the middle of the night, drunk and disorderly people are everywhere, and still, no one has yelled or said profanities like they do online. 

If you decide to stop on the street, that's your call. You can walk on, just like you can swipe away. But no one yells out s*** before they leave in front of everyone because they're held accountable, right in the moment, for what they do. Online stuff is really tricky. Everyone is like a warrior.

I hope the good outweighs the bad for you in this business.

Yeah, it does. It does. I just feel like it's getting to the point where a whole bunch of artists are going to start talking about it. It's a good thing to bring up. We have a voice. Whether I'm the biggest artist in the world or the smallest, I think it's really important to mention it. I always tell my friends that kindness stops bullies.

Give me a line on Welcome To The Madhouse that carries special weight for you.

I would say the bridge of "Dark Waters": "I don't see the world I got / But I keep rolling on / 'Cause I am never happy with enough / Until I'm drowning from it all." That song I wrote at the point where "Dance Monkey” had just gone No. 1, so I was at the peak of my "Holy s***!"-ness. My first billboard in Times Square. I had just gone to the States and played sold-out shows. I had just started a Europe tour as well.

And then, I got to a point where—I don't know why, but I was so sad. Maybe because my dreams as a busker, I had been pulled from that really quickly. Like, "Cool, we had fun. Let's do this." I didn't know why I was so sad. I kept trying to do more and more things, like "This will make me happy," but then it wasn't. I think I needed to be home and be grounded and see my friends. I got picked up and flung around the world. But that's where that line comes from.

Do you have a message for your trolls and haters?

I love you! Hopefully, we can meet in person one day. I just announced a U.S. tour, so if you want to come meet me in person, that's fine. Tickets are open for everyone. We don't discriminate at Tones And I shows. Also, I hope you listen to the album if you haven't. It isn't all the same, so I guess there's a song for—I'm not going to say everyone—the majority of you if you listen and pay attention. I had fun making it and I hope you guys enjoy it.

That's very magnanimous of you. No implied threat in there.

[Knowing laugh.] No, no. No, no.

San Holo Gets Personal With New Indie Rock EDM Album 'BB U Ok?'

Up until now, Michelle Zauner's albums as Japanese Breakfast were mired in grief. It's more than understandable: They were written in the wake of her mother's death. But while Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017) mourned her mother's cancer and passing—both depicted in harrowing detail in Zauner's new memoir, Crying in H Mart, where she also reckons with her Korean identity—her upcoming third album, Jubilee, lets some light back in.

Of course, one can't emerge from grief by discarding it entirely; Zauner sits with the darker moments, too. On "In Hell," she describes keeping her mother's pain at bay near the end of her life: "I snowed you in / With hydrocodone / Layer by layer 'til you disappeared." Notably, that song is a former bonus track, reinvigorated for Jubilee. Why, then, does she put that track, and the similarly reimagined "Posing in Bondage," on her new, optimistic album? For Zauner, it's a "good reminder of where I've come from." Her mother passed six years ago, and she's processed that grief to the point where "time has healed a gaping wound, and it's something that I will live with forever, but it's less debilitating." Most importantly, she said, "I want to write about something else."

So on Jubilee, Zauner strives for joy. She said she feels "like I'm able to do things in my life now that aren't all clouded over with grief," and she wanted to explore that optimism in herself. From the bright, horn-heavy opener "Paprika" to gothic, dancey tracks, Zauner's Jubilee hinges on possibility and hope: She reminds herself that she's allowed to feel joy after this deep, consuming sadness.

GRAMMY.com caught up with Michelle Zauner to dive deep into Jubilee, which drops on Dead Oceans June 4.

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I'm really curious about the timeline of working on the album and working on the memoir—did they overlap?

I was working on the book pretty intensely from probably 2017 to 2020. I sent out my first draft to my editor in October or September of 2019, so I kind of had this built-in break for three to five months where I just could not think about it, and it was in her hands, and I could go off and work on another big project. It was really time for us to start recording a new record, so I started writing and recording largely in 2019.

They are separate but, not to be cliche, they are interrelated in so many ways. Did you apportion certain ideas to one [project] or did they influence each other?

A good deal of the record has to do with my personal life in some ways, and a lot of it was the aftermath of where the book left off, [that] is actually the content of the songs. I think if anything, I wrote two albums that were largely focused on grief and then this whole book that really dove into that experience, [and then] I felt like I was actually really ready to fling myself to the other end of the spectrum and write about this other part of my life that is a bit more joyful.

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That's actually what I was going to ask you about—this album is titled Jubilee, which means celebrating the passage of time. Was there a moment or catalyst, like "it's time to turn towards joy," or was it a slow realization?

I don't know if there was a catalyst, I think it was the slow processing of grief over the past six years, and it just made space for me—time has healed a gaping wound, and it's something that I will live with forever, but it's less debilitating, it's less of my primary focus. I feel like I'm able to do things in my life now that aren't all clouded over with grief.

It was definitely a conscious choice to be like, "OK, I've written two very dark albums and a whole book about grief, I want to write about something else," because I feel ready to do that and I'm interested in these other parts of my life and joy in particular. I think a lot of what I was going through was: "You're allowed to feel again, you're allowed to feel joy." A lot of the record is about struggling or figuring out how to do that or making decisions for myself that allow me to embrace that again.

I feel like "Paprika" really encapsulates everything you're trying to do on this record — it's very naturalistic, there's so much possibility. And then there are songs on the record like "Savage Good Boy" and "Kokomo, IN" which are more narrative and use personas. Why did you decide to do that?

It just happened organically. It's something that I've done before and I've always had a lot of fun with, and I think it's just like flexing this different type of muscle. I think I read something about billion-dollar bunkers in the news, and it inspired this whole narrative about a billionaire coaxing a young woman to live with him as the world burns around them.

"Kokomo, IN" happened because I was taking a lot of guitar lessons at the time and so of course I was learning a lot of Beatles songs, and adding all these sort of more interesting chord changes, a lot of major-7s and major-4s, these same type of very classic chord changes that made me write this very sweet, classic song of longing and teenage feeling. I just followed the natural narrative that the song created for itself.

You mention in your new memoir, Crying in H Mart, about being seen as a "bad girl" when you were a kid. The song "Slide Tackle" brings that up, too. Do you still think of yourself like that?

As a bad girl? [Laughs.] I'm so obsessed with striving to be a good person. My brain is very occupied, and I think a lot of my songs really boil down to "I want to be better, I want to be a better person." That song starts with "I want to be good / I want to navigate this hate in my heart / somewhere better." A lot of my songs are like that—I actually had to catch myself, because I'm like, "You can't start every song with 'I want.'" [Laughs.]

And "Diving Woman" [on Soft Sounds from Another Planet] also starts that way: "I want to be a woman of regimen." A lot of these are very simple ideas of "I want to be a more regimented person, I want to be in control of my emotions, I want to be kind to people," and I'm still a moody little f***er, but I try to get a better handle of that as I've gotten older and I definitely don't value that part of myself. I always want to be a better person.

You mentioned your guitar lessons, and I know you did a lot of work as a songwriter as you were creating this album.

I felt a little stuck and needed some brushing up. I've always been very willfully ignorant of music theory and thought it would hinder my natural songwriting ability, and I realized after years of touring and working professionally as a musician, I got to meet so many stunning musicians who have this incredible education that I've become quite envious of. I feel like that really inspired me to get back in and see what it could bring out in me that was new.

Did you like it?

I really liked it, actually. I was like, "This whole time there have been this many chords?" [Laughs.] I felt really stupid that I'd kept myself away from it for so long.

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Between "Posing in Bondage" and "Posing for Cars"—this might just be me being prosaic—I thought a lot about  the word "posing," like posing for art, or even posturing. Those songs are so chilling and isolated.

["Posing in Bondage"] feels really fraught with tension and I think it's very delicate but also kind of industrial. The song was something that we put out with Polyvinyl on a 4-track series, and it was a very, very low-fi version of it that I don't feel like did the song justice and it's always been a song that I really liked. This was another song that I co-produced with Jack Tatum of the band Wild Nothing. He is just a real sonic wizard, he's a real tinkerer of tone, and he found this perfect balance of tension and these really unique sounds that give it this very fragile, vulnerable feeling. I really was happy to get it where it needed to be, and there's this almost Enya-esque vocals at the end.

Can you tell me a little about how "In Hell" came together?

That was actually a bonus song for Soft Sounds, for the Japanese deluxe edition. It was just one of those songs that stuck around and has haunted me for a very long time. I think it's a very beautiful and intense song and some of the greatest lyric writing I've done. It's very melodic and pleasant…I just felt like it didn't deserve to die as an exclusive bonus track, I really wanted more people to hear it. I think it's almost more devastating because it's on a record that's about joy, with a lot of warmer songs. I think it finds a good place there, sonically it fits, and it's a good reminder of what I've endured and that it's possible to experience happiness after these two incredibly dark moments in my life and comparing them. That song's literally about euthanizing my dog and comparing it to snowing my mom under with drugs, and it's spun into a little pop number.

Even as we keep talking about grief and sadness, we go back to Jubilee as a tribute to joy. What, right now, brings you joy?

I have a really great life, honestly. I have the greatest job, and I value that so much. I was kind of a late bloomer in this industry and it's allowed me to be so grateful that I've won this lottery and get to be a creative person for a living. I'm so overjoyed that I've found love in my life that's incredibly stable and very fulfilling, just endlessly fulfilling. Those two things alone—I've just won the life lottery, in that sense.

Listen: Celebrate AAPI Month 2021 With This Playlist Featuring Artists Of Asian & Pacific Islander Descent

After a year of tinny bedroom livestreams, we're all raring to enjoy some concerts again. Let the alternative-pop singer/songwriter LP remind you what those were like. 

In the latest episode of Press Play At Home, LP wails their 2020 single "The One That You Love" with a crisp, full band, driven by reverberating, Motown-sized drums.

LP's influences are appropriately stadium-scaled—The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Queen—and once recorded with Cyndi Lauper on a shelved release. 

Let's hope we can hear that team-up at some point. But in the meantime, check out this terrific performance of "The One That You Love" above and watch more episodes of Press Play At Home here.

Press Play At Home: Francisca Valenzuela Performs Her Courageous Feminist Paean "La Fortaleza"

Many artists now viewed as self-evidently revolutionary were once seen as merely provocative. The Beatles once sparked parental panics and religious boycotts; now, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr both have "Sir" before their name. Jim Morrison made Nietzchean inquiries into sex, death and the nature of prayer; today, The Doors sound comfortable and comforting. Half a century later, get a load of Sophie, a gender-norm-shattering Scottish producer with a bold expression who refused limitations—in music and in society. The artist’s uncategorizable, maximalist tracks resemble avant-garde electronica meets IMAX-scaled sound design.

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Immerse yourself in tracks like "Bipp," the alluringly fun club banger; "Ponyboy," an experimental track full of sexual inuendos; or "It's Okay to Cry," a song full of comforting vulnerability, and you'll find an artist on the bleeding edge of culture. Still, Sophie was perceptive enough to know the artist was one of many more to come.

"There's a huge amount of work to be done socially and culturally in the gap between where we are now and, I imagine, where we could be," Sophie, who was transgender and preferred not to be referenced with gendered or non-binary pronouns, told Arte Tracks in 2018. "The places that our imaginations can take us are so far away from what we're presented with a lot of the time. So, I can't get too excited about anything happening now. I'm really excited about what should be happening in the future."

Sophie tragically died on Jan. 30 after slipping and falling from the three-story balcony of an apartment where the artist stayed in Athens, Greece, while trying to take a picture of the full moon. Sophie was only 34. "She will always be here with us," the artist's label Transgressive said in a statement, calling the artist's desire for the lunar shot "true to her spirituality." 

Sophie's girlfriend, Evita Manji, told Daily Mail she spoke to Sophie after the fall. "I managed to tell her I love her and to keep fighting," she said. "She's an immaterial girl now; she can be anything she wants... and she is in everything around us," Manji said in a later online tribute.

Sophie Xeon was born in Glasgow in 1986 and grew up absorbing rave tapes from the artist's father and experimenting with synthesis. In the early 2000s, the precocious musician relocated to Berlin and formed Motherland, a dance-pop collective. Motherland's Matthew Lutz-Kinoy used the artist's music at exhibitions in Europe and the New Museum in Manhattan and boosted Sophie's signal.

A decade later, Sophie began DJing and releasing music. In the early 2010s, the artist rose as part of the forward-thinking PC Music Collective production team, which operated parallel to and against the mainstream’s current.

The artist's career began in earnest with the effervescent single "Lemonade / Hard,'" keeping her identity a secret in the beginning. (She revealed her face for the first time in a music video in 2017). "I think about physics and materials [while creating]," Sophie explained to Billboard in 2014, revealing a scientific-like approach to creating music. "'Lemonade' is made out of bubbling, fizzing, popping, and 'Hard' is made from metal and latex—they are sort of sculptures in this way. I synthesize all sounds except for vocals using raw waveforms and different synthesis methods as opposed to using samples. This means considering the physical properties of materials and how those inform the acoustic properties.

"For instance—why does a bubble have an ascending pitch when popped and why does metal clang when struck, and what is this clanging sound in terms of pitch and timbre over time? How do I synthesize this?" the artist asked. "Perhaps after learning about these things, it might be possible to create entirely new materials through synthesis."

"Lemonade / Hard" ended up in a 2015 McDonald's ad and seamlessly worked in that context. Sophie had no compunction about licensing the artist's music in commerce. In the same interview, Sophie frankly called the artist's genre "advertising"—which might seem like anathema to those committed to operating in a counterculture at odds with capitalism.

"Pop should be about finding new forms for feelings and communicating them in ways which talk about the world around us right now," the artist told The New York Times in 2015. "There’s no need to view something commercial as necessarily bad. I believe you don’t need to compromise one percent on what you want to present and need to communicate to people en masse."

Almost immediately after the McDonald's ad, Sophie became part of the mainstream landscape, releasing the artist’s debut album Product in 2015. That year, the artist co-wrote and produced Madonna's infamous single "Bitch, I'm Madonna." Sophie followed that up with writing and production work for artists as divergent as the dance-popper Charli XCX (2016's Vroom Vroom) and Odd Future MC Vince Staples ("Yeah Right" and "Samo" from 2017's Big Fish Theory). Sophie also remixed Rihanna's "Nothing Is Promised," a track from Mike Will Made It's debut 2017 album Ransom 2.

"It’s impossible to summarize the journey I went on with Sophie. Even the most insignificant things felt enormous,” XCX expressed on Twitter. “All I can [say] is that I will miss her terribly—her smile, her laugh, her dancing in the studio, her gentle inquisitive voice, her cutting personality, her ability to command a room without even trying, her incredible vision and mind."

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Staples also took to social media to remember the artist. "Sophie was different," he said in a Twitter tribute. "You ain't never seen somebody in the studio smoking a cigarette in a leather bubble jacket, just making beats, not saying one word. And don't let the verse be deep or heartfelt, 'cause she stopping the computer and walking outside until you get bacc [sic] on some gangsta shit."

In 2018, Sophie released the artist’s second and final studio album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. The album is fascinating, a tidal wave of disparate styles—glitch, techno, dream pop, ambient house, EDM, and more—coupled with a transgender and transhumanist visual aesthetic. The album was met with acclaim, earning Sophie a GRAMMY nomination for Best Dance Electronic/ Album in 2018. "This 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," Exclaim! wrote in a glowing 2018 review. 

Sophie left us far too soon, but for anyone wondering if the future of music will resemble this singular artist, here's a thought: Given how the Internet age has bled all genres and stylistic eras into one morass, like in Soundcloud rap—and how traditional ideas of gender are being deconstructed and reexamined daily in mainstream culture—this makes it not just conceivable but likely.

There may have only been one Sophie, but if you’re looking for a bellwether of what a pop musician might look and sound like in the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th centuries, look no further.

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