Sophia Stel

She wasn't handed a studio. She built one in a nightclub basement - disassembling it before doors opened, rebuilding it after - while bartending shifts paid the bills. She doesn't have a vintage microphone collection or an SSL console. She has a 2013 MacBook, a microphone that cost around $300, a $100 interface, and Logic Pro. That's the whole setup. And she's used it to build the kind of musical identity that earns you a spot on the NME cover.

What she makes is not easily filed. Critics reach for Ethel Cain's gothic vulnerability and 070 Shake's woozy melodicism and still come up short. Her music borrows from trip-hop's haze, rave music's pulse, shoegaze's blur, and post-genre pop's refusal to stay still. Songs end up sounding like the walk home after the club - when the night's biggest feelings arrive at 4 a.m. and you're not ready for them.

She grew up in Saanich on Vancouver Island, one of ten children in a strict religious household, where Pachelbel and Puccini moved her more than anything on the radio. She started writing songs at seven. Taught herself on GarageBand in high school. Learned a few chords from a brother. Eventually upgraded to Logic. The progression wasn't linear - it was just a person who needed to make music finding whatever tools were closest.

At 18 she moved to a skate house in Victoria. At 21 she came out as queer and relocated to Vancouver, which she describes as the point when her life "started to get good in a lot of ways." The city's DIY scene - specifically Paradise, an after-hours club that functioned as a creative hub before it closed - became her laboratory and her community. She worked there nearly five years as a bartender. She built her studio in the green room downstairs. She introduced herself to the city by being in it, fully, every night.

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Her 2024 debut EP Object Permanence arrived on Pack Records with zero industry fanfare and a lot of word of mouth. The title references the psychological concept that objects continue to exist when you can't see them - her way of processing attachment difficulties and the particular ache of loving people who disappear. Six tracks. All self-produced. All quietly devastating.

Then came "I'll Take It." The song started on a walk - post-breakup, mid-intensive-nightlife-era, the kind of moment where you have to record it immediately or lose it. She went straight to Paradise with collaborator Aaron Lum and captured it before it faded. When the deluxe edition of the EP arrived in March 2025, that track found TikTok. Breakup advice videos used it. Hopecore friendship content used it. Troye Sivan posted an Instagram with it. By any measure that matters, 8.6 million Spotify streams happened because one song told the truth in a way that couldn't be ignored.

A.G. Cook noticed before the numbers did. He discovered her after she opened for him in Los Angeles in late 2024, offered production mentorship, and the co-sign mattered not because it changed how she made music - she still uses the same cheap setup - but because it confirmed that the people who listen carefully were paying attention.

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The title of her second EP came from a flip phone. She'd been using a Blackberry Pearl - deliberately, as a way to stay present - and the only game it had was Solitaire. She could never win. Googling strategy returned advice so abstract it sounded like poetry: "Move your cards with intention." That became the album's thesis. The EP, released September 2025 on Pack Records, pressed further into electronic textures and emotional complexity. "Everyone Falls Asleep In Their Own Time," its lead single, earned praise from Stereogum and Gorilla vs Bear. "All My Friends Are Models" arrived on the deluxe version featuring Tommy Genesis. Cecile Believe contributed her own version of "Everyone Falls Asleep In Their Own Time" - described by critics as arguably the strongest moment on the entire deluxe edition.

The same fall she walked the Ann Demeulemeester SS26 runway at Paris Fashion Week. She appeared in the Palace Skateboards holiday lookbook. She headlined Pitchfork Festival Paris in November and took the show to Barcelona, London, and Berlin. The NME put her on the cover. The fashion world and the music world were both calling at the same time and she took neither call too seriously.

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In February 2026 she signed to A24 Music - the film company's label, which launched in April 2025 and had previously signed only one other artist. The announcement came with a 22-date headline tour and a clarity of direction: she's working on her debut full-length album, recording mostly at home and on the road, still self-producing.

The first single via A24, "Bitches Talk Shit," arrived April 22, 2026 with a DIY video shot with friends at her Vancouver apartment. The lyric lands squarely: "Cause you're a rock star, you should have a lot of money / Of course I am a pop star, but I'm still very up and coming." That's not false modesty. That's accurate. And it's exactly the kind of self-aware, slightly sardonic honesty that makes her music work.

In May 2026 she opens for Lorde at the Kia Forum in Inglewood - alongside SMERZ, on Lorde's Ultrasound Tour. This is the part where the trajectory becomes undeniable. But she's still living with two of her brothers in Vancouver. She still uses the flip phone. She still records on the same laptop.

Everything she's done has been built on the premise that presence matters more than image management, and that if you're actually paying attention to your life, you'll never run out of things worth singing about. That's not a strategy. That's a worldview. And it happens to produce remarkable music.