God is a DJ, Sophia Stel is the Music

The effortlessly undone electronic darling on surrendering to imperfection and her new EP, How to Win At Solitaire.

By Cam Delisle

Photos by Angela Donna

Published on September 5, 2025

The first time that I heard Sophia Stel, I was at the beach chain-smoking Vogue Superslims my friend had brought back from France. I’m not a smoker, but something about the late light, the soft dread of late August, made it feel like the right kind of cliché. She queued up “You Could Hate Me”—Stel’s latest at the time—on a sandy Bluetooth speaker, and I was immediately locked in. It was pop, technically—but warped and disarming, like it was made for one person and accidentally shared with the rest of us. I assumed she was some Oklou-adjacent electronic darling I’d somehow missed in my monthly SoundCloud deep dive, however, at the time, Stel was just getting started.

Stel Zoom’s in from her apartment dawning a vintage Cavalli tee, flanked by a shrine of track pants, zip-ups, and secondhand designer pieces that look like they’ve been curated by someone who definitely knows a thing or two about looking effortlessly undone. There’s an unspoken cool to her that instantly makes you get why she’s on everyone’s radar right now. It’s never an act, even when she migrates to her fire escape mid-call for a smoke like it’s the most natural thing she could possibly be doing.

From opening for A.G. Cook last fall to her viral-hit “I’ll Take It” landing unexpectedly as the soundtrack of a Troye Sivan Instagram thirst trap, Stel is tacitly extending an already promising year. Crafted midway through her new project, How to Win At Solitaire, the track later surfaced on the deluxe edition of her EP, Object Permanence.

“It was a very cool moment. I was going through a breakup, and making music was feeling kind of difficult at the time,” she says, the kind of understatement that belies something heavier. “I had played Aaron [Lum, Stel’s friend and co-producer] the beat and he was like, ‘Let’s go to the studio right now.’ So we went, drank a couple bottles of wine, and finished it in the studio at Paradise,” she adds—Paradise being a basement club in Vancouver’s Chinatown, one of those places that only exists when you need it to.

That same cracked-open urgency seeps into How to Win At Solitaire, a record Stel says emerged from a stretch of solitude and self-reckoning—“spending more time alone than [she’d] ever had.” “How to Win At Solitaire, the title, really stuck with me,” she says. “I had a flip phone for years, and that was the only game I really had on there. I could never win, so I googled it—and the advice was something super abstract, like ‘Move your cards with intention.’ It basically said there’s no clear-cut way to win, which felt kind of similar to the kind of vague advice you get about, you know, how to be alone or whatever.”

Rather than reaching for clarity, the music itself leans into ambiguity, floating in a liminal space between immediacy and detachment. Its sound is gauzy and distorted—fragments of trip-hop, muted drum loops, and filtered vocals swirl together like early-2000s comedowns that never quite resolve. Stel doesn’t so much lead these songs as she drifts through them, her voice occasionally submerged, stretched, or barely there at all. “All Seven Seasons” is a highlight—looped guitar, skittering drums, everything slightly off-axis. Like the rest of How to Win At Solitaire, it’s less about polish than sensation: clipped, isolated, anti-expressive in a way that still lands.

Stel’s rough-around-the-edges approach isn’t carelessness—it’s a commitment to grit over finish. “I’m not much of a perfectionist, I just want it to be listenable,” she says, as if that were ever really in question. “I think sometimes it’s just a matter of convincing myself that it’s good enough to let it go. It’s less about feeling like ‘this is totally perfect,’” she says. That straightforward pragmatism cuts through the usual artist anxieties around perfection, a testament to Stel’s ability to balance vulnerability with resolve.

While most emerging artists present calculated visions of control, Stel’s path is defined by uncertainty. “I keep trying to make a plan, but it’s kind of proven to be impossible because things are just changing constantly,” she says. There’s no meticulous strategy—just a commitment to keep creating amid the flux. “The only clear-cut plan I have is just making as much music as possible… this year, I probably need to learn to be okay with not knowing what’s going to happen.” Her perspective rejects tidy identities and linear stories, embracing the friction inherent in transformation.

Solitaire isn’t about mastery—it’s a game of endurance, an exercise in sitting with uncertainty and learning to be okay with what you can’t control. That ethos runs through Stel’s music and her process: a restless, ongoing disruption. This is the sound of an artist fully aware that the only constant is change—and that’s where the real potential lives. If How to Win At Solitaire stakes a claim in electronic pop’s fringes, Stel’s next move will be less about winning and more about what it means to keep playing.