It’s a seasonally ambivalent day at Brooklyn’s Herbert Von King Park, and Vancouver-based singer and producer Sophia Stel is in need of a lighter. She’s smoking Canadian cigarettes, which, as I hand her a light blue Bic, she describes as “more polite,”
taking after her fellow citizens’ pleasant disposition. She’s in town doing press ahead of her album release party this week. The record in question is called the greatest album of all time, and it feels like watching a shy kid blossom in front of a talent show crowd.
Stel first came onto the scene in 2024 with her debut EP, Object Permanence, though she says she’s made music since she was seven. For years, she psyched herself out of sharing what she was making. “It’s just so lame to be so afraid of what people think that you make all this music for years and never release it because you’re scared it’s not perfect or something,” she says. Releasing those first songs helped put the stakes in perspective: “If you drop a shitty EP, you’re going to be OK.”
It turns out she had nothing to worry about. Object Permanence found a devoted audience as Stel’s open-faced vulnerability meshed with her left-field pop sensibility. Songs like “You Could Hate Me” and the later single “I’ll Take It” infused the hyperactive electro-pop of the early 2010s with a melodic curiosity that could recall Future’s melancholic crooning as readily as Rihanna’s dance-floor yearning or the warped guitar pop of ML Buch.
Releasing the songs, she found, meant learning when to stop working on them. She settled on her six best and tried to “work really hard at not losing touch with them or overdoing it, just try and believe in the songs.”
With last year’s How to Win at Solitaire, the accumulation of years making music by herself became apparent. The EP’s sonic palette — a lush collage of electronic, trap, and ambient music, guided by sticky melodies doused in an almost ghostly Auto-Tune — felt like a distillation of the moment. Access to disparate sounds is already a given. Stel’s achievement is making those influences into a language for expressing a real feeling.
For years, Stel supported herself with jobs that left room for music. She worked as a gardener, bartender, and house painter, gradually dropping each job as she began earning money from shows. Painting was the last to go. “I was always shaping my life to have space for music, if that makes sense, picking jobs,” she says. “House painting is the best job because all day I’m maybe listening to an audiobook or not listening to anything, just painting a wall thinking about music, and then you come home and you’re so excited to do it.”
She had made peace with the possibility that this would be her life. “I’ll probably work during the day and then come home and make music,” she remembers thinking. “I was like, that’s OK. It’s just who I am, I guess.”
The new album’s title began with an earlier interview following the success of How to Win at Solitaire. Stel says her remark that, like everyone else, she wanted to make the greatest album of all time appeared as a declaration that she was going to do it. She decided to use the title herself, making that level of confidence part of the assignment.
Following the success of her first two EPs, she suddenly found herself at last year’s Paris Fashion Week before even receiving her record label advance, trying to navigate settings she felt unprepared for. “I literally have one outfit and I’m so not prepared and I don’t know how to act,” she remembers thinking.
“I was like, ‘I’m going to make an album that helps me to feel the type of confidence that I feel like I need going into these rooms,’” she continues. “And I think that being kind and confident is the best way you can be in life. Too much insecurity makes you hold yourself back, but it also makes you treat people poorly because you’re trying to make yourself feel better.”
Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Sophia Stel grew up in a religious household, the third of 11 children. In her childhood home, she remembers, only one person was supposed to cry at a time. The rule wasn’t strictly enforced, of course, but her parents were trying to manage a household where one upset child could set off several others.
“But there was one point where there’s eight kids under 10 in the home and one of them would start crying and then everybody would be like, ‘Fuck yeah, I’ma start crying too,’ because everyone’s trying to get attention,” she says. “So I think my parents were like, ‘You need to let someone have their moments.’”
She thinks that childhood arrangement helps explain how she behaves when someone else becomes upset: She can turn stoic and start trying to solve the problem. Her own feelings often catch up later. On “Molly in the Club,” from the new record, she envies someone else’s ability to cry. The song’s production has the elastic bounce of a pure pop hit. Drums burst over pirouetting synth chords, while Stel’s wispy harmonies evoke the feeling of coming up on ecstasy.
She wrote the song when she felt mostly over the breakup it describes. “I was like, why was I so upset, and what was so upsetting about these certain things?” she says. She had taken molly shortly after the breakup, finding herself sad about the relationship while simultaneously feeling chemically happy. She says she tried writing other songs about the breakup before this one came together.
“It’s like I’ll be trying to write a song closer to the event happening and I won’t feel like I understand it. And then six months go by and I’m like, ‘OK, now I understand it.’”
Stel is telling me about falling in love again when a remote-controlled car catches her attention. “Whose is that?” she asks. “I need to get one of those at my house.” We spend a moment figuring out who’s controlling it before she notices two babies reacting to the car. “This is too sweet.” Then she picks up where she left off. “But yeah, no, I am in love now.” She arranged the album to follow the order in which things happened to her, rather than the order in which she recorded them. “I was getting over something at the beginning and then I fell in love again in the middle,” she says.
There’s an irony to one of the album’s sadder moments coming on “Wedding Song,” where Stel mulls over the idea of marriage. “It’s sort of my own experiences with being queer and not widely accepted by my family,” she says. “So it’s having to do with that and knowing that a lot of people wouldn’t be there, that kind of a thing. And accepting that, but also accepting that I would still want it.”
Writing has helped Stel work toward conversations she finds difficult to have directly. “I get better every year at also saying things to people’s faces, not just through music, because I think that’s important,” she says. Often, she begins with a few words she has been carrying around. “I’ll have a conversation with someone and they’ll say something interesting or they’ll phrase something funny and then I’ll write it down,” she says. She holds on to those fragments until she finds a beat they fit.
Figuring out how to fit those words into a melody has been its own education. She credits Future with helping her understand how. “I like to write words and I want to put a lot of words in a song,” she says. “And so having listened to a lot of Future, who has such interesting melodic twists and flows. I think through osmosis of just being a big fan has helped me to understand how to do that better in a lot of ways.”
A few days later, at a album release party not far from the park (Lorde was in the crowd, casually, of course), the night ends with something of an impromptu karaoke session. Stel sings along to a string of Future classics booming through the venue. Funny enough, she’d told me earlier that she was too nervous for karaoke.
“But when it comes to my music, I’m like, I have to be the strongest advocate, and also I have to get up there and sing it and show that I love it, and that’s the most important thing I can do when I’m performing live,” she said then. “And even if I do feel really awkward and maybe am awkward, it’s still worth it because I love this thing.”
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