Sophia Bel, Montreal's Princess Of The Dead, Is In Control

By Yara El-Soueidi


the opening 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 as soon as scene kids and preppy jocks shared high school hallways. The Montreal indie-pop singer explores unique sounds crafted from the music that influenced her if 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 handle her bullies gave her any time while 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 routinely 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 sort of take something that comes from so much trauma, and then flip it over to something positive and reappropriating the name because like, ‘Yeah, whichever. I'm emo. Who cares?’ It could still exist. We should validate ourselves. It's essential to process our trauma and stuff. Nevertheless it's also nice to sort of appreciate what it's taught us and why it makes us stronger.”


Bel’s music captures that strength and showcases it in other ways. Her single “You’re Not Real, You’re Just a Ghost” is a powerful denunciation of a former flame who ghosted her, while “No More” is a hot and sexy retelling of a high-chemistry relationship with a toxic side. She explores these deeply personalized subjects, in turn connecting with listeners through universal themes of love and heartache. Her own experience, meanwhile, has habitually been unique. Place on Earth in Michigan to a Québécois father plus a Dutch-American mother, she grew up in a suburb of Québec City and moved to Montreal to increase independence. Soon after per year of working in cafés and playing music, she determined to go to school and study jazz composition as a way to connect with other musicians.


This and all her other stories build her inspiration and creativity. That’s how you get the relatable kiss-off of “You’re Not Real, You’re Just a Ghost,” told over sugar-filled pop-rock that will inevitably make you dance before a room of imaginary specters. Bel says she wrote the song to communicate her feelings about the complex and precarious positions of love. “It's about being ghosted, ghosting, and the general difficulty communicating in relationships,” she says. “It's really hard to be weak some days. For me, it was really about that aspect of things that I have been through, like, several times with several different people.”


Keeping those stories close to her, Bel is personally involved in each aspect of the creation of her music. From co-producing her album, which blends pop melodies and downbeat trip-hop elements, to her involvement in the edgy and eye catching aesthetic she puts forward, every aspect of her artistry is believed by her with the help of local collaborators and producers. She loves the control. Before she began producing, she often felt lost in other people’s visions, which felt inauthentic to her voice and ideas.


“I wanted have the ability to express my vision even more precisely,” Bel says. “It's not about being fully self-sufficient and attempting to do everything alone. I really like the craft. It's just something that I adore doing. It makes [listeners] feel better any time Once I can put more of myself into it.”


Reflective of all of this is also her edgy fashion. Enthusiastic about style and taking her aesthetic to heart, she describes her whole look as “dark and playful,” adding that she doesn’t overthink it once it comes to clothing, going with what inspires her in the moment. Just as her music can evoke a blade-thin flip phone, her fashion takes inspiration from her youth, including spaghetti-strap, mesh tops, and bell-bottom pants. That’s also thanks to her Montreal-based glam squad, composed of stylist Laurence Morisset and hair and makeup artist Roxanne Selleck. “I have to say them any time talking about my fashion, because it's really sort of like a really fun brainstorm all of the time with those two,” Bel adds, giggling.


The conversation about companions, music, and fashion eventually drifts toward the pandemic and why she’s been dealing with its impact. She mentions having ups and downs in 2020, not feeling especially inspired, although this static downtime was a possibility to push herself to process her feelings, preoccupations, and face herself by learning to be more vulnerable.


“We have to face ourselves because we can't distract ourselves as much as before,” she adds. “So, yeah, it's still very introspective like everything that I do. It's routinely sort of related to my youth, how I deal with things in the present and why it's connected to everything.”


And in connection to everything, her French single, “Voyage Astral [Astral Trip],” approaches introspection and change through an ephemeral trip-hop beat, taking listeners on a journey through eye catching clouds outdoors of space and time. That energy is reflected in its video, which was fully produced and self-shot through an old digital camera from the early 2000s. It has a quintessentially spiritual top quality to it, an extension of the tarot and New Age practices she uses as therapeutic equipment to spark conversations with friends.


“I feel like it routinely evokes whichever is going on in your life,” Bel says. “It is very much about how some days you visualize yourself in a new way that you've never seen yourself before, and then question that and you also evolve. So that's why I like bringing sort of the ethereal side to it, because it's sort of nice to just appreciate the ethereal sides of life.”


Maybe Bel will get more ethereal in 2021. She’s keen on being gentler and kinder to herself — which you could hear on the EP’s closing track, “Clover” — something she thinks each person should do. A good place to begin? Maybe someplace remote and unexpected, where creativity can flow.


“I wish to go, as soon as we're allowed to, in a cabin in the woods,” Bel says. “I aspire to create an album in the woods.”