Sophia Stel: Unplugged and In Control

The rising alt-pop artist is aiming to live in the moment with skate videos, a flip phone, and music that captures exactly what she’s feeling.

by Ben Boddez

Published on September 10, 2024

On an average day in Vancouver, you might find alt-pop artist Sophia Stel on her board, skating with her brother at a Chinatown skate park, or playing a show at Fortune Sound Club, where she recently appeared alongside ascendant Toronto singer Loukeman. More likely, however, you’ll just find her at home working on music.

“Honestly, I’m pretty reclusive, but I’m starting to challenge myself to engage more,” Stel says. “Vancouver can be really hard, there’s really strict rules around nightlife. People get shut down a lot and it’s very easy for things to become divided if people don’t really ride for each other. There’s a lot of people that are doing that really well, and I’m just trying to learn from them.”

She doesn’t identify with the hyperpop community per se, but Stel is the kind of artist who will giddily bring up Sufjan Stevens, Cash Cobain and PC Music founder A.G. Cook in the same breath when asked about influences. Her songwriting approach parallels the former most of all, with sombre, confessional streams of consciousness pouring out through various vocal filters. Ethereal atmospheres suddenly shift into pulsating house beats and glitchy synth soundscapes.

Stel has found that the parts that feel freeing for herself and also connect with audiences the most are the ones that pour out of her unexpectedly with no plan – a mentality that she’s started to apply to almost every aspect of her creative process.

“Sometimes I try to have a certain amount of a plan, or certain things I want to write about, but honestly, most of the songs that end up getting released are very personal, when I just start making a melody and see what happens,” she says. “I have to trust that even if the instrumental or lyrics are a little abstract, people will understand it in their own way.”

Even Stel’s latest music video for her single “You Could Hate Me” was shot on spur-of-the-moment decisions, four days before it was scheduled by her team for release – she simply rounded up a crew of friends and took to the beach. She finds the modern-day focus on heavily marketed, obviously touched-up short-form content “depressing,” knowing that she herself would want to see something a little more authentic and unpolished. In fact, Stel lives in the moment so much that she even has a “dumb phone” – a flip phone from LG.

“I’m already on a screen all the time, making music or a video on my laptop. So it’s like, I don’t really need to be when I leave my house,” she says about her decision to switch. “I think I can be introverted, and if I’m in a group of people I get socially tired and sit there and scroll. I was like, I’d rather sit there and say nothing, and observe and be present. I felt like I was just missing interesting things when I was walking around.”

Stel is preparing for the release of a new EP, Object Permanence, which is named after a concept that stems from child psychology – the one where some babies become terrified during a game of peek-a-boo, afraid that their parent has disappeared forever because they can’t comprehend that something out of sight still exists. Stel applies the concept to a long-distance relationship on the title track.

“There’s certain things in my life that have made me struggle to attach to certain things and people, and I was in a relationship with someone who travelled a lot for work and we spent a lot of time apart,” she says. “I kind of go into my own world and have a hard time maintaining a relationship without having someone in front of me. And I think that’s really what the song is about, trying to figure that out, and also trying to explain to someone that they’re still so important.”

Stel’s interest in this field makes a lot of sense: she grew up in a house with 10 siblings, and getting the attention she required wasn’t always easy to come by. Growing up in what she calls a house with a “logical way to talk about your feelings” and being queer amid a mountain of religious pressure didn’t help matters either. A lot of her earliest music deals with her feelings about this time.

“The best part was that we looked out for each other, and we could play an epic soccer game if we wanted to,” she says. “The hardest part is that I think kids need individual care in a lot of ways, and a one size fits all parenting approach is hard if there’s a lot of people – a lot of people slip through the cracks. And I was an older kid, so I feel like I had almost more of a parental role.”

When Stel turned 18, she moved into a skate house in Victoria, pursuing her two greatest passions by crafting beats in a basement studio and heading out on the board with her newfound community. Skate culture and music have a long, intertwined history, but for Stel, she sees skating as an art in and of itself – and as much of an escape from reality as her music was.

“When you watch a skate video online, something that’s been really put together, it’s very intentional,” she says. “Skaters who put their lives into it, they time tricks to the music, they think about spots they’re going to skate, the architecture of the building, how it looks in the background, the colours of what they’re wearing with the colours of the sidewalk or scenery… I think some other sports can still be art, but I don’t know if it’s as intentional.”

Whether what comes out in her music began as intentional or not, Sophia Stel’s combination of raw emotionality and innovative blends of sound certainly has her turning heads and we can’t wait to hear what she does next.