We spent the day with Sophia Stel
It feels fitting to meet with Sophia Stel during Lesbian Visibility Week. As we walk around London’s brutalist Barbican Centre ahead of her show later in the evening, she eagerly tells me I need to get a pair of her boxers merch – branded Sophia Stel in a font knowingly reminiscent of Calvin Klein. Later, when I make it to the merch stand, they’re already sold out. It seems her other lesbian fans had got there first.
Stel arrives for the interview dressed in her usual uniform: Adidas track pants, which she tells me she owns around 25 pairs of; a True Religion hoodie and bright red Superstars that match the low-slung, red Telfar bag she is now fumbling around in for a pack of Belmont Kingsize. After she finds them they don’t leave her hands again.
Over the past year, Stel’s moody electronic tracks have been wired through the headphones of the most tapped-in. It’s an ascent that can be mapped by milestones: the breakout virality of track “I’ll Take It”, her recent signing to A24 and the packed-out crowds at her shows, often captured in grainy camcorder footage by best friend and creative collaborator Scarlet Ross, who joins us today.
But her rise can also be measured more materially – through the tequila stocked on her rider. As we climb the Barbican’s endless staircases, she explains how her earliest shows came with the cheaper bottles on her rider, yet over time, increasingly premium brands have begun to appear backstage.
The following night she is set to play buzzy South London club Lost before heading back on the road to complete the UK leg of her tour. From here, Stel will step onto her biggest stage yet, opening for pop royalty Lorde. Announcing the slot on Instagram, she wrote: “Dreams actually do come true.” She DM’d me and I was super nervous to respond,” recalls Stel. “I was really baked at the time, and me and my roommate couldn’t believe it was real”.
While many artists rising now can trace their sound back to Lorde-era pop and blown-out LimeWire downloads, Stel’s path looks different. “Honestly I did not grow up listening to a lot of music,” she says. “I grew up religious, so it was mostly religious music and classical. I was actually really into opera as a child.” When asked if she ever imagined becoming an opera singer, she laughs. “Yes. Badly. I thought that was my whole direction.”
Her actual direction turned out to be a little different: moody production; warped, low-lit elecronics, crooning vocals and lyrics about lovesick longing and late-night spirals. “I try to write things that are very reflective of my life and current experiences – that’s my north star,” she says.
It’s a sound she built early, writing songs aged seven and later making trap beats in high school. Before her breakout, she worked shifts at Paradiso, a Vancouver club where she would write lyrics into her phone notes between shifts. “The Vancouver scene is a lot of people trying their best – there’s a lot of room for experimentation because people are quite isolated from other scenes,” she says. It was in the club’s basement that she began recording her debut album Object Permanence, piecing the tracks together after closing.
With tonight’s soundcheck fast approaching, we make our way to a nearby beer garden. Over a tequila soda, I learn that Cash Cobain is her dream collab right now; Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games was her gay awakening, and Future’s “Purple Reign” is the track she’s bumping on repeat.
Her new track “Bitches Talk Shit”, which dropped the day before we meet, is accompanied by a grainy handheld video of her and her entourage cutting between kitchen light and cigarette smoke at a house party. “Cause you’re a rockstar you should have a lot of money / Course I am a popstar but I’m still very up and coming,” she chants on the track. A few hours after we leave her for soundcheck, she posts a blurry shot of a Patrón bottle from her rider to Instagram – it looks like things are only on the up.
Sophia Stel’s latest track “Molly In The Club” is out today
