Small Studio Saturday: A24 Music Bets on a Vancouver Artist Who Named Her Debut 'the greatest album of all time' Lowercase, on Purpose

Sophia Stel’s path to this week’s release reads like the exact kind of story this column exists to cover before the rest of the music press catches up. Born Sophia Johanna Stel in Saanich, British Columbia, the third of 11 children in a religious family, she worked gardening, house-painting, and bartending jobs before her 2024 debut EP, Object Permanence, came out on Pack Records – a label small enough that its name means nothing to most listeners. A 2025 follow-up EP, a spot on NME’s 100 Essential Emerging Artists list, opening slots for A.G. Cook and later Lorde, and a runway appearance at Ann Demeulemeester’s Paris Fashion Week show built the profile that got her signed to A24 Music, the boutique record label arm of the film studio behind Hereditary and Everything Everywhere All at Once – itself still a small, curated operation by major-label standards, picking a handful of artists rather than running a roster.

That deal produced the greatest album of all time, Stel’s proper debut, released October 16 – title rendered entirely in lowercase, a deadpan joke the record doesn’t bother explaining. Stereogum named it Album of the Week on release, a real and specific co-sign for an artist three EPs into a career that’s mostly happened outside the music press’s normal sightlines. The album, dedicated to her brothers Luke and Royce, expands her sound well past the minimal trip-hop/hyperpop blend of the earlier EPs into rave anthems and ambient textures, anchored by the pledge-like lead single “I Do,” reviewed alongside this feature at 7.6/10.

What’s Small About This

A24 Music is not a DIY bedroom operation, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise – it has real resources and a real cultural profile behind the A24 name. But measured against the Drakes and Taylor Swifts occupying the rest of this week’s coverage, it’s a tiny, hand-picked roster making a deliberate bet on one artist at a time, the same scale of operation this column exists to flag. Stel’s own road here – gardening jobs, a label nobody outside a specific scene had heard of, years of opening slots before any of this – is the real story underneath the association with a trendy film studio’s name. The title is a joke. The path that got her here, and the album that finally arrived to test it, isn’t.

Hero image: Sophia Stel, press photo by Mikaela Kautzky. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.