Sophia Stel

Born in Victoria, Canada, right across from Seattle and a stone's throw from the US border, Sophia Stel established herself in 2025 as one of the most promising new names in North American indie-pop underground. Her artistic journey began in 2021, when she moved to Vancouver, where she joined the local skater community, came out, and started frequenting the city's small but lively music scene. To support herself she took on a string of odd jobs, working as a gardener, a house painter, a bartender, because Vancouver is a very expensive city and if a young person wants to live there and seize its opportunities, they have to hustle. Sophia Stel debuted in May 2022 with a single, “ineedthat”, followed a year later by “Old Spice Icon”, two tracks built on a form of modern electropop heavily influenced by the pc music circle. Things got serious starting in February 2024, when Sophia began drip-feeding a series of six songs that would later be collected on the EP “Object Permanence”, released the following September. Sophia started circulating early live footage and a few videoclips, A.G. Cook noticed her and invited her to open one of his shows, even giving her some advice. Not a bad start.

Vancouver is a very cold, rainy city, where depression reigns during the winter months. Fertile ground for letting post-adolescent introspection blossom, translating it into words and music, capturing life as it happens. Sophia is genuine, still completely uncontaminated, not yet bound by the constraints of the star system, not yet standardized. If we had to introduce her through a comparison, the most natural one is undoubtedly Ethel Cain, especially the Ethel Cain of “American Teenager” and “Crush”, an almost embarrassing resemblance: physical appearance, voice, musical construction, all of it. The arrangements of Sophia's early songs start out minimal, but almost always tend to ripple outward as they go, enriched by beats that set the atmosphere ablaze, dragging her inner analysis into something to be explored inside a fashionable club. Constructions that at times might recall the work put together by The XX – but also the respective solo work – of Romy, Oliver Sim and Jamie XX. If you want to feel more hype, you could reference the French artist Oklou, another artist in search of interesting, modern intersections between electronics and songwriting.

On “Object Permanence” feelings are traced in darkness, but then emerge, finding their own way toward the light, driven by the typical energy of the outsider. Everything is engineered to provoke an instinctive reaction, to leave an emotional imprint. The music on “Static” and “I'm Not Alone” is intimate and vulnerable, between soft synths tracing dreamlike scenarios, reflective lyrics and relaxed Balearic flourishes. But there are also small guitar explosions handled on a Mac (“No Pressure”), the radio-friendly roundness of the title track, and the unstoppable urge to party that emerges in “You Could Hate Me” and the unbridled “I'll Take It”, the song that changed the course of Sophia's life, a track that's been going viral on TikTok for a few months now, among the soundtracks of young Americans during the summer of 2025. An expanded version of “Object Permanence”, enriched with “I'll Take It” and three remix versions, gives rise to what can be considered Sophia Stel's first official album.

Sophia draws on the quiet isolation that characterizes much of the life of today's twenty-somethings, using auto-tuned aesthetics to stay connected with them. Apathy, but at the same time a search for connection, always the same thread. The three remixes tacked onto the end of the tracklist, three bonus tracks added to the original EP, dwell on the introspective side, but at the same time inject propulsion, a liberating phase, the urge to come back together and celebrate, especially in the remixes of “Object Permanence” and “You Hate Me”.

But the multifaceted Sophia doesn't stop there: her slightly dishevelled air, the very long hair falling wild, the pouty little face, the indie-slacker attitude of someone who goes to the gym every day but you'll constantly catch with a lit cigarette, make her perfect for the world of fashion. For the 2025 Christmas lookbook, the famous skate brand Palace chose Sophia as its face. She's also recently made her runway debut, walking for Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester, and has appeared in photo shoots wearing Prada, Balenciaga, Diesel and Adidas. In short, at 26 she's establishing herself as one of the coolest emerging artists of the moment.

Having banked compliments from A.G. Cook and Troye Sivan, both of whom declared themselves early fans, Sophia shuts herself away in the basement of Paradise, the Vancouver venue where she works as a bartender, improvising a nighttime recording studio on weekdays, where she can crank the volume all the way up and experiment with sounds, blending guitars and electronic backing tracks. She was working through the end of a relationship, mixing her own personal diary with reflections on the everyday life of her peers, fusing apathy with the search for possible connections with others, alternating guitars and auto-tune, and one new song after another kept coming out. What's happened in recent months has made her one of the most promising next big things on the Canadian indie-pop circuit. First came three singles released in quick succession, “Everyone Falls Asleep In Their Own Time”, “Taste” and “All My Friends Are Models”, all accompanied by self-produced videoclips, the solid foundations on which the new EP “How To Wun At Solitarie” was built, rounded out with three further unreleased tracks. The more vulnerable sides of her personality (on the shadowy “Taste”, “I'd Rather Be Yours Than Mine” and “Solitaire”, which seem to absorb something from “Folklore” and “Evermore” too) coexist with the indie-(electro)-rock surges of “Everyone Falls Asleep In Their Own Time”, the EP's standout track, and “All My Friend Are Models”.

In these intense days time is flying by for Sophia, so much is happening: her first mini European tour, in the autumn of 2025, kicked off by an appearance at the Pitchfork Festival in Paris, a feature on the opening track of John Beltran/Placid Angles' comeback record, “I Want What I Want”, another feature on the track “Just Want” from Perfect Person's debut, a collaboration with Sees0000 (both released in early 2026), and a new version of “I'll Take It” – her most significant indie-hit so far – shared with Mura Masa. Everything seems to be falling perfectly into place, Sophia really does seem like the right artist at the right time. Her fan base is growing, even though Sophia avoids the excessive influence of social media (there's no trace of the young Canadian on Facebook, just a few images on Instagram) and has ditched her smartphone for an old-generation phone, as shown in one of her self-directed, improvised visuals, which carry the same blurry realism of old photographs and treasured memories.

2026 continues with more excellent singles doled out sparingly: in April the danceable “Bitches Talk Shit”, in June the sumptuous “Molly In The Club”, which are beefing up the setlists of the shows Sophia keeps playing on both sides of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, her presence has been announced on the bill of the two 2026 editions of Primavera Sound scheduled in Latin America: in November in Buenos Aires and in early December in São Paulo.