Sophisti-pop

It’s kind of a funny name, sophisti-pop. Like a lot of subgenre titles it feels reductive and catchy to a fault, there to get a point across without painting the whole picture. Sophisti-pop is meant to describe something akin to adult alternative: music that has its hands in the pies of jazz, R&B, the glossy modern pop of the 1980s/early ’90s. I like describing it as Bowie’s Young Americans played exclusively on MIDI instruments. However you approach it, it’s a lovely lazy river to delve into. The languid tempos, the ambient flourishes. You put on Love Deluxe or Kaputt and you’re transported to a world of muted chrome, where everyone is beautiful and sad and in dangerous, extraordinary love.