On her 8,533rd day on Earth, Sofia and the Antoinettes is thinking about legacy, luck and what it really means to live as if the curtain is always rising.

23-year-old Sofia – aka Sofia and the Antoinettes – invites me into her house, which just happens to be flat 111 of the 11th building on a street I can’t name for obvious reasons. I’m no numerologist, but that feels like a good sign: an angel number, the kind of coincidence that sets the tone before a word is spoken. Inside, she sits by the piano, golden locks perfectly in place, make-up immaculate, smoking one cigarette after another.

I am meeting her on the day her single, “Hi My Love”, drops – a song that’s sparked a genuine existential crisis. “It’s scary. It’s an old song, about two years old,but I don’t feel like I can let go of the version of myself who wrote it without it being out. It’s kind of selfish.

”Music has always been the soundtrack of her life. Born in Derbyshire, Sofia moved as a child to the sunny shores of Mallorca after her mum “couldn’t stand it there.” Her father, a devoted fan of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and The Rolling Stones, filled their home with songs that shaped her earliest memories. “I remember being eight and reading the lyrics to “Famous Blue Raincoat”, thinking, ‘Why did he take a lock of Jane’s hair?’” she recalls. When I ask when music became serious for her, she’s blunt: “It was always serious.”

In school, Sofia lived in the music department – a space where she could immerse in her practice. She began playing the piano at five and wrote her first song at 11. “I just always knew,” she says, when asked why music called to her so early. “I actually don’t know. [It was a] need. I got used to processing my emotions that way,and then I couldn’t stop.”

Back in London at 18, Sofia enrolled at Goldsmiths University, where her artist name, Sofia and the Antoinettes, was born from a mix of her tutor’s insistence she present a concept and her own desire to reflect the multiplicity of herself. One morning, having watched Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette unprepared, she suggested, “What if I am Sofia and the Antoinettes?” It stuck.

 From the way she smokes to the way she talks, Sofia seems born to perform. She admits to having done “one harp lesson, just so I can say I did one harp lesson,” but this isn’t a character she’s playing – it’s her, 24 hours a day. “I struggle to do things without an audience. Alone, I might do nothing for hours; with someone else, I perform.”

Naturally, she thrives in the limelight. She curated her own residency at Bar La Doña in Stoke Newington in summer 2025, followed by recently headlining BBC’s Introducing Ones to Watch night this January. Her love for performance, she says, comes from “serotonin, adrenaline, being the centre of attention, all the things you’re not supposed to say.” Her dream venue? “Carnegie Hall,” the legendary stage where artists from Tchaikovsky to The Beatles have performed.

What sets Sofia apart, however, is her love for words. In her living room, books surround me. She writes extensively, often beginning with poetry or short stories. “Writing, to me, is the most important part. When I listen to music, I hear the lyrics louder than everything else.” Tracey Emin, Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Eve Babitz – they reflect the honesty she strives for in her lyrics. “Here’s my diary. Everybody read it.” 

Throughout our conversation, she constantly references other artists – authors, directors, musicians – a generosity of influence many creatives in the music industry might shy away from. “We [musicians] don’t create music. We sculpt sounds and words from other things we like,” she tells me, a sentiment shared by a friend from Los Angeles that has stayed with her.

She doesn’t overthink who her music is for. “Yes,” she replies simply, “the girls and the gays.” In her mind is Lady Gaga giving it her all at Lollapalooza in 2007, performing in front of a small daytime crowd wearing nothing but heels and underwear. She is as deliberate about her image as she is her music: “I have a deep, deep-rooted fear of being forgotten. So I guess that’s another way to express, ‘I swear I’m not.’”

I mentioned a photograph on her Instagram from three years ago that reads: “leaving the house is a performance,” and how it feels like the perfect summary of her as an artist. She smiles. “That’s actually the title of my next EP.” While her work is intensely personal, she is also working on a letters project: a collection of songs inspired by love letters she found at a flea market, experimenting with writing from the perspective of women from the 1950s.

Her goals for the coming year are ambitious. “I want to play a lot more shows. I want to tour – I’m excited for that. I want to put out an obscene amount of music. I want people to be like, how the fuck have we had this many releases? Oh, and I want to pass my driving test – the sixth time’s the lucky one.”

How does she plan to make all this happen? “I think what you put out into the universe comes back to you. It’s like that with any love you give throughout the day – you’ll get it back, from other people, from things, from luck. I think actually, luck is a different thing. Luck is very real. I’m manifesting, and I’m in control of striving for this honesty, of depicting my experience, my reality. And so I’m manifesting that for myself.” 

As the conversation winds down, I ask if there’s anything else she wants to share. Sofia leans back and says: “Today is my 8,533rd day on Earth.”

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Photography by Miriam Marlene
Styling by Abigail Hazard
Words by Moira González
Hair by Jacqueline Ezeuko
Make-up by Madeleine Feeney
Fashion Intern Scarlett Milroy