As a visual, I tell the pop producer, ‘octopus brains’ reminds me of the album’s title—Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides—and I ask her to unpack the name a bit more. Suddenly, she goes from describing her work as a multifaceted referential project to something more off-the-cuff. “I was just stoned and thought it sounded cool,” she says. “Then I told it to other people and they were like, ‘That’s annoying and really pretentious sounding,’ and I thought, everyone hates it. I’ll use it.” SOPHIE knows how to push our buttons.

But sometimes, she tells me, her point gets lost in translation. Having emerged alongside London-based label PC Music, whose roster of artists and producers have become known for their progressive play on pop tropes against glossy, futuristic, often dense instrumentals, SOPHIE soon spearheaded a fresh pop sound of her own, unlike anything music listeners and critics had ever heard before. Whether the “PC” in PC music stood for “pop culture,” “politically correct,” or referenced the personal computer was unclear, and wasn’t the only vague aspect of the producer’s aura.

Her early music, like 2013’s “Hard” and the 2014 hit “Lemonade”, felt more like plastic toys—bent and sculpted versions of mainstream pop’s most pleasurable elements— than songs. Back then she never fully revealed her face in public, remaining only partly illuminated by the dim stage lights that reached behind the DJ booth during live shows. Her first compilation of singles, entitled PRODUCT, was sold in “silicon bubble cases” and coincided with the launch of a naughty-looking black rubbery device, like some sort of gift set from a high-end sex shop. In 2015, “Lemonade” was used in a nationwide McDonald’s commercial pushing the restaurant’s new iterations of the beverage—“Get together with the refreshing real lemonades from McCafé, made with no artificial flavors.” It all seemed too perfect.

In response to the high-profile sync, a headline in The Guardian wondered aloud: “SOPHIE’s Lemonade ad for McDonald’s: flagrant consumerism or the future of pop?” Other articles, in Vice and elsewhere, went so far as to propose the potential abandonment of PC Music and its associated acts, arguing that the whole movement, SOPHIE’s corporate partnership included, could be an elaborate ruse, intended only to instigate, and might not be worth fans’ time. Post-internet and mystery-fueled, SOPHIE and the PC Music collective— the producer is not actually in PC Music, merely a friend whose work runs parallel—ruffled feathers by making people question what was real, and what was advertising. But the artist is no contrarian, she assures me—she’s simply putting out work that expresses her truth, without much heed for how many critics can relate.