It’s a dramatic curtain-up on SOPHIE’s next phase as a frontwoman. Her sudden visibility is partly political. “If you really want things to be integrated, respected and accepted then you want to do a thing and get on with it and have your work acknowledged, rather than anything else,” she says. But there was an internal shift, too, “of just feeling like… the only way I can put it is having fun in your body. Seeing it as something you like and love and want to have fun with, and is going to carry you around and enable you to do things you want to do.” Like a material to be manipulated? “That kind of thing, yeah. It’s not like a weight you’re carrying around with you that’s fighting against you.”

Before now, she says, “I never felt that way, which is why I had to present things in the way I did. But my intentions have been clear from the beginning, in the way I wished to be referred to and the way that things should be presented visually. I did the best I could.” She picks her words with care. “It’s tough when firstly you want to be seen as a woman, and you want to be seen as an artist and an individual. So to have something like your gender identity preceding everything that’s written about you is difficult. It can be humiliating to be singled out in that way.”

Fundamental to every SOPHIE track is an interest in materials, their properties and interactions. She synthesises every sound from scratch, using an Elektron Monomachine and Logic to build up huge libraries of samples. “There always has to be a link between the lyrical ideas and the sound itself,” she says. “A sound will be the initial spark, a very physical response to sound that ties together some of the things I’m thinking about.” The metallic creak in Ponyboy, for example, “was like a mechanical animal of some sort that I was finding sexual,” inspired by thoughts of JG Ballard’s Crash.