Sophia Stel has a very specific memory from last year’s Paris Fashion Week . She was suddenly moving through unfamiliar, decidedly more glamorous rooms than she was used to, and walking the runway for Ann Demeulemeester—but she was also broke.

“I really only had one outfit, and it’s black and navy, which is supposedly against the rules,” she remembers, as we catch up at the end of summer in east London over coffee. “I actually think black and navy look amazing together.” The tension of it all fed directly into “On My Dick,” the opening track of her debut album, The Greatest Album of All Time, and what she calls an “all-out diss track” about people who were more in it for clout and the money she didn’t have.

“I had a lot of frustration and such bad imposter syndrome.”

The title of the record—announced today—is a dare to herself. “One of my greatest struggles—and why it took me so long to start releasing music when I’d been making it for so long—is confidence,” the 27-year-old artist and producer says. “Ultimately, the reason this album is called The Greatest Album of All Time is because it’s about this decision to be kind of absurdly confident.”

Due October 16 via A24 Music, the 10-track self-produced record follows Stel’s 2024 debut EP, Object Permanence , and this year’s How to Win At Solitaire . Born in Victoria, B.C., and shaped by years working in Vancouver’s club scene (there, she worked a number of non-creative jobs to get by), she made music on the side for many years before her emotionally electrifying, genre-hopscotching songs began finding an audience.

In the past year, she made that aforementioned runway debut, opened for Lorde, and embarked on her first headline tour, going from barely traveling to crossing the Atlantic regularly.

“I’d never been to Europe until this time last year, and I’ve been over 10 times since,” she says. “I lived my life in one sort of way for quite a long time, and then things really flipped. I found myself in all of these new spaces and having new types of experiences.”

The Greatest Album of All Time is Stel’s attempt to capture that whiplash while it is still happening. She finished the album only days before our conversation, having told A24 she wanted to keep making it throughout the year so it could remain “a response to what was going on in real time.”