Hey, buddy, did you hear the news? It's track reviews.

Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, Internet's busiest music nerd. I hope you're well.

This week we have been hit with some very interesting and surprise news that we are going to get an album of posthumous material from the one and only, the late great producer, songwriter, Sophie. And of course, off the bat, this has been met with some mixed reactions as music fans, especially those who, in a sense, feel protective of Sophie's legacy and image, of course, don't want this to be some exploitative project used to just squeeze a final few dollars out of Sophie's memory. Across social media, I have seen a lot of voicing that concern, which, again, I get because in the music industry these days, we see more of that than it should be acceptable.

However, my own personal concerns around this are put at ease when you look into the fact that Sophie's brother has, for years now, been talking about the potential of a project like this. So it is assuring knowing that individuals that were super close to Sophie in some form or fashion and have a lot of investment in making sure a project like this sounds good and comes across as flattering to Sophie's memory. Those are the kinds of individuals who should be involved in such a project.

And again, the fact that discussions about this very thing have gone back for quite a few years now, it is assuring to know because obviously this record is not something that's been just rushed out in a matter of months or that a bunch of random songs that were just left over are being just thrown together casually and released without a second thought. If that was in fact the case, I think a record like this would have come out a lot sooner than what we're seeing here. If you're really seeking to only simply maximize profit on a project such as this, doing it at this somewhat late date is not the way to go about it.

So yes, in fact, this album is on the way, and we actually do have a first teaser single from it as well, the song "Reason Why," which features Kim Petris as well as BC Kingdom. Apparently, this song has been played and performed live, so there are some hardcore Sophie fans who likely will be familiar with this track in some capacity. I'm also appreciating that the cover art here is obviously a throwback, a reference to Sophie's first big breakout compilation project that featured classic bangers such as "BIPP" and "Lemonade" and a lot of those great breakout early singles.

Admittedly, "Reason Why" is not a track that I'm personally familiar with, so this will most likely be new to me. If I have heard this track before, in some capacity, the memory of that is escaping me right now. Either way, let's give this track a spin and see what it's got exactly, "Reason Why."

Okay, cool. Coasting out on a chill ending there. The Kim Petris feature was not as hard-hitting as I hoped, but I still liked the direction this track went in overall. vibes were immaculate. I feel like on the song, we were getting the deconstructed club, but without the deconstruction, we were just getting the club. There were a lot of elements from the percussion to especially that little synth flick that was playing throughout the song. That, again, felt very familiar, very reminiscent of a lot of material from that original product record. But there was something about it this time around It felt a little more confident, smoother, slicker, a bit more of a sheen on everything production-wise that was happening here. It was a bit more mature because as great and as thrilling and as vibrant and as crazy and as chaotic as a record as product is, it's also very messy.

It's also very amateurish and rough around the edges, but in all the right ways, for sure. This seems like it has a bit more of a steady hand guiding it. And a record of stuff that goes in that direction could most certainly be interesting from Sophie with this track between those scents, between the beats, between those driving kicks, the way that builds up toward the end. Sophie was rounding out with a lot of those classic dance music tropes behind this thing, with a lot of clarity, and I would say comfort in this feeling that I've experimented and abstracted with this sound and this style for so long. Let me try to do something in it that feels a bit more formal and true to the original essence of what I'm inspired by, which is often a cycle and a trajectory that we see a lot of electronic music artists go in these days, Daft Punk or otherwise.

I felt like this was a pretty decent track overall, and sounds certainly good enough to release. I mean, those pitch little vocal chops across the track are catchy as hell. The production and mix sounds good. And again, given just how long this thing has presumably been in the works, it doesn't sound rushed or just thrown out there casually. Fingers crossed that pretty much every track on this upcoming project follows suit with that. Because, again, hate to be cynical here, but we do hear way, way, way, way, way too many posthumous records that pretty much go down that path.