For Sophia Stel, music starts from a feeling before anything else. The Vancouver artist has created a dreamy and intimate sound, with flecks of indie rock and distorted pop. Her music feels diaristic without becoming overly explanatory, personal while still leaving enough space for listeners to find themselves inside it.
As her notoriety grows, Stel chooses to stay evasive and lets her music speak for itself. Instead, she continues to prioritize instinct, building songs, visuals, and worlds around whatever feels most exciting in the moment.
How has your relationship to music changed as more people have started discovering your work online?
I’ve tried very hard to let it not be affected. In some ways, it feels exciting to make music that people might listen to, but at the same time I try really hard to continue to make the things that I ultimately really want to hear.
Your music moves across a lot of different sounds and moods. Do you think about genre at all while you’re creating, or does it happen more naturally?
I don’t think about genre very much. It just doesn’t feel so relevant these days. I really like to blend lots of things and at times I’m more excited by certain sounds or instruments, so I just try to go with what I’m feeling most excited by.
I usually write from a specific feeling, but sometimes the meaning behind that feeling becomes clear to me later. My music is very personal. It feels very specific to me, but I want it to feel open-ended for others so they can apply their own life experiences to it.
You’ve built a strong visual identity alongside the music. Do visuals and aesthetics come naturally as part of the process for you, or separately afterward?
They come very naturally. I’m always thinking about visuals as I’m making songs, and just in general as I’m living my life. I’m always noticing things that I want to include or keep track of.
A lot of artists feel pressure to constantly share themselves online now. How do you balance visibility with keeping parts of your life private?
I think social media is a good tool to share things and meet people, but I’ve always been relatively private online.
I don’t mind explaining things when I’m asked directly, but overall I think letting the work speak for itself is important.
Do you think younger audiences are connecting differently to music right now compared to even a few years ago?
I think people are really into discovery right now, which is cool to see.
Live performance and internet discovery feel much more connected than people sometimes think. I feel like people care a lot about being in person, so those things go hand in hand. When you find someone online whose music you like, a lot of times you want to go to a show too.
Ryley Paskal
Future of Music is about artists shaping what comes next. Do you feel like your role is to challenge expectations, or simply make work that feels honest to you?
Make work that feels honest to me, but I’m always trying to challenge myself.
What does success mean to you right now, and what are your thoughts on the future of music in Canada?
Financial stability and making music that I really like.
There are a lot of great people in Canada right now making great music. I think people in positions of power need to put a lot more money and focus into underground spaces and DIY communities.
A past show produced by The Concert Production for Sidhu Moose Wala.
The Concert Production founders Sohail Mansuri and Zeeshan Siddiqui. Photos: Courtesy of The Concert Production
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Drake onstage in Toronto last year
Everybody Likes Drake Again. That Means We’re Healing
Not to be dramatic or anything, but not too long ago, listening to people talk about Drake, you’d think he would never top the charts again. But here we are: With Iceman, he’s broken his own record, earning a 13th week atop Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart on Sept. 5, surpassing Take Care’s 12-week run more than a decade ago. The achievement comes after the great rap civil war of 2024, which was framed as everything from a referendum on Drake’s character as a human being to a cleansing of what popular radio host Ebro would describe, in February 2025, as “a sickness in the game.”
Again, not trying to be dramatic, but even if you were skeptical of the discourse circa 2024, it is a bit shocking to hear the public’s recent re-embrace of Drake. Consider how far the frenzy around the most salacious allegations on Kendrick Lamar‘s “Not Like Us” extended. There was Christopher Alvarez, a disabled journalist, being dragged into conspiracy theories. There was the woman from the resurfaced concert footage, now 31, having to publicly dispute the creepy significance strangers had assigned to an onstage kiss from when she was 17. Drake said in his lawsuit against UMG that the threats had forced him to pull his seven-year-old son out of school.
What now feels like the absurdity of the moment registered as something deathly serious at the time. By September 2024, Lamar was releasing the ominous “Watch the Party Die,” just days after his Super Bowl halftime performance was announced. Oh, also, a major talking point in American culture a year and a half ago was whether one of the biggest superstars in the world would be publicly branded a pedophile during the Super Bowl.
In what world would any celebrity recover from that?
Except, with time, the online frenzy surrounding the Drake and Lamar feud reads more like a mass-psychosis event than a cultural reckoning. The music, oddly enough, often seemed secondary to the certainty of everyone discussing it. “Not Like Us” was a veritable hit, absolutely. But its cultural dominance became bound up in a widespread vilification of Drake that curdled online, where the most damning interpretation of anything could quickly become the accepted one. For a while, even putting on a Drake song could feel like something you had to explain, as if listening amounted to taking a position on the allegations.
That this all happened in 2024 is meaningful. This was right in the peak of Elon Musk’s reconstruction of Twitter, privileging rage bait and engagement tactics that helped misinformation disseminate like fact. It was also the beginning of AI tools becoming sophisticated enough to produce convincing-sounding tracks. Even before Drake released his first response, “Push Ups,” AI-generated response tracks were circulating across social media. And so, in many ways, the well of public opinion was already poisoned.
Listeners’ recent embrace of Drake feels settled in a broader cultural shift brewing since 2024. The beef, in hindsight, feels like a dying vestige of whatever people want to call “Woke 1.0”: a particular faith that exposing the right person could amount to a cultural transformation. For a moment, defeating Drake seemed to promise something about the future of hip-hop, about who would belong in it and what it would tolerate.
There were obvious holes in the argument, namely who exactly these arbiters of culture were and why they were uniquely qualified to speak for the entirety of Black people, questions that Drake pokes at on “Ran to Atlanta” from Iceman. Still, these were never even supposed to be binding philosophical truths in the first place. To hear levelheaded commentators discuss it, this was all simply entertainment — two of the genre’s greats duking it out. Even one of the beef’s catalysts, Metro Boomin, echoed the sentiment, lamenting how online fans had turned the battle into something sinister. Hell, even Jay-Z said something similar before himself tossing a few jabs at Drizzy in a freestyle at the Roots Picnic this year. But the artists themselves supplied the allegations. The ability to raise those stakes and then retreat into “simply entertainment” was part of the dynamic, too.
Even so, how it all devolved into a pseudocultural reckoning says more about the environment fans exist in today than it does about either Drake or Lamar. In the years around the beef, shocking revelations about Diddy as well as the global elite’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein have become folded into the background, alongside a sense that accountability remains selective. This atmosphere of collective powerlessness offers one explanation for the conspiratorial thinking at the heart of Lamar versus Drake. A frustration with an increasingly degraded world and dwindling resources to change it means outrage can mobilize an enormous number of people very quickly, with little holding them together once the moment passes.
The language of exploitation and cultural extraction gave the battle a purpose that seemed to extend well beyond either rapper. But even if you took the least charitable opinion imaginable of our Canadian hitmaker, what was supposed to happen after Drake was defeated? The industry whose supposed wickedness Drake allegedly embodied carried on selling the spectacle itself.
What everyone was caught up in was an appetite with a longer history than the social media platforms now feeding it. Lance Oppenheim’s new film, Primetime, returns to Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator, a television format that made public humiliation feel like a public service. The connection is in the experience offered to the audience. The viewer could enjoy the confrontation with the reassuring sense that watching served some larger good. Never mind if anything that was unfolding on screen amounted to justice.
In the historian Anton Jäger’s book-length essay Hyperpolitics, published earlier this year in English, he describes how the past decade’s surge of political feeling has coincided with a continuing withdrawal from communal life. More isolated digital environments can fuel extraordinary mobilization without the actual community organizations that might turn it into something tangible. Negating Drake, then, became a gesture in itself. A means of signaling a broader dissatisfaction with the direction of hip-hop culture. Where the problems extend to technology and the demoralizing margins of streaming music, for a while it felt good for people to just wrap it all up in one word: Drake.
But on Iceman, it’s hard to take the idea of Drake as an evil force within hip-hop very seriously, even as he himself makes an effort to lean into the role of the villain. Drake’s music is most potent when it’s aimed at the masses, even if he swears his nice-guy days are over. This is the Degrassi kid turned global superstar rivaling Taylor Swift, after all.
Now, with Fear of Missing Out, Drake’s cryptically announced project slated for release this week, we’ve entered a second kind of Drake Renaissance. However delusional it seems, there was a moment when it felt somehow wrong to play Drake. His return to the top of the charts suggests a good deal of people were eager to get back to listening.