News: Sophia Stel announces Melbourne and Sydney headline shows for December

Vancouver artist and producer Sophia Stel will make her way to Australia this December, adding two headline dates around her appearance at Meredith Music Festival 2026.

Stel will play Melbourne’s Night Cat on December 10 before heading north for a Sydney show at Oxford Art Factory on December 12, giving Australian audiences their first chance to catch one of alt-pop’s more intriguing new arrivals in a headline setting.

The dates come at the end of a busy 12 months for Stel. Her latest run of music includes the playful, self-produced ‘Molly In The Club’ and the recently released ‘Now I’ve Got A Lot You Know’, her latest single through A24 Music. Both arrive as Stel continues work on her debut album.

Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Stel first began gathering attention with her 2024 debut EP ‘Object Permanence’, introducing a sound that refuses to sit neatly within conventional pop boundaries. She followed it with 2025’s ‘How to Win At Solitaire’, written, produced and recorded in a makeshift basement studio beneath the now-closed DIY venue Paradise, where Stel once worked.

The deluxe edition brought further attention through ‘I’ll Take It’, which found admirers in Troye Sivan and A.G. Cook. Collaborations with Mura Masa, Tommy Genesis and Cecile Believe have since broadened a catalogue built as much around Stel’s production instincts as her distinctive alto.

Her reach has expanded well beyond the studio. This year Stel opened for Lorde at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum and embarked on a 22-date European and US headline tour, while her increasingly multidisciplinary career has also taken in Paris Fashion Week, Pitchfork Festival Paris and fashion campaigns.

With Meredith already on the itinerary, the Melbourne and Sydney dates provide a closer look at an artist whose rise has largely happened outside Australia so far. For Stel, they also arrive at an interesting point: between the breakthrough of her early releases and the debut album currently taking shape.

Frontier Members can access the presale from 12pm local time on Wednesday, August 26, with general tickets on sale from 1pm local time on Thursday, August 27.