Sophia Bel, Montreal's Princess of the Dead, is in Control
[This article was originally published on MTVnews on January 12, 2021.]
The rising indie-pop singer’s music is as sharp as the era-appropriate Razr smartphones it calls back to.
The first notes of Sophia Bel’s songs evoke old memories of Razr phones, iPod Nanos, ultra-shiny bubblegum lip glosses, and heavily underlined eyes — a time when scene kids and preppy jocks shared high school hallways. The Montreal indie-pop singer explores unique sounds crafted from the music that influenced her when she was a teenager, the post-punk and pop offerings of the early 2000s. Her latest two EPs, both titled Princess of the Dead, refer back to the nickname her bullies gave her when she was a teen, an emo kid in suburbia. Her music and the EPs — including her more recent release, which dropped late last year — became a way for her to exorcise that experience.
“It's always nice to take from our bad experiences and appreciate what it has taught us,” she tells MTV News. “It's just nice and therapeutic to kind of take something that comes from so much trauma, and then flip it over to something positive and reappropriating the name because like, ‘Yeah, whatever. I'm emo. Who cares?’ It can still exist. We should validate ourselves. It's important to process our trauma and stuff. But it's also nice to kind of appreciate what it's taught us and how it makes us stronger.”