The East London artist’s sophomore EP, “Leaving The House Is A Performance,” arrives May 15 via Warner Records, and it announces a singular voice that was never going to stay quiet for long.
Sofia and the Antoinettes does not write songs so much as she writes evidence. Evidence that a relationship was lopsided, that a feeling was real, that a woman existed in a particular kind of pain and chose to make it beautiful anyway. At 23, the East London artist has already built a word-of-mouth following on the strength of vivid lyricism and a stage presence that stops rooms. Now she has a sophomore EP to her name and a debut UK headline tour to play. The momentum is not accidental.
“Leaving The House Is A Performance” arrives May 15 via Warner Records. It is a six-track collection that continues where her 2025 debut EP, “Women Who Love Too Much,” left off, though it moves with greater sureness. Sofia describes her aesthetic as “existentialism in high heels,” a phrase that is easy to dismiss until you hear how accurately it lands. The songs carry that exact weight: dressed up, going out, quietly falling apart.
The announcement comes with a new single, “I Don’t Know What I’m Doing on Earth, I Don’t Know What on Earth I’m Doing,” a title that doubles as a thesis statement. The track is characteristic of Sofia at her most searching: melancholic melodies, lyrics that reach for something just beyond articulation, and a vocal delivery that sounds like it was written in the margins of a journal kept only for herself. The song collects names from the past and circles the question of why we are here at all. It does not answer it. That is precisely the point.
The EP’s lead single, “Hi My Love,” was named BBC Introducing’s Tune of the Week earlier this year, a recognition that caught up with what listeners already knew. Sofia’s debut received support from BBC Radio 1 and Wonderland, and her live appearances, including showcases at SXSW Austin and support slots for Lola Young at the London Palladium and the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, have confirmed that she belongs on those stages. She also performed at The Lower Third for their Ones To Watch series, a platform that tends to be right about these things.
The tracklist for “Leaving The House Is A Performance” runs as follows: “Buried In This Room,” “Naked Chess,” “Hi My Love,” “I Don’t Know What I’m Doing on Earth, I Don’t Know What on Earth I’m Doing,” “Vespa,” and “Jewellery Box.” Each title suggests a scene, a small domestic theatre in which something larger is playing out. That is her method.
Her debut EP, “Women Who Love Too Much,” drew its title from Robin Norwood’s 1985 book of the same name. It was a collection of intimate portraits of love, loss, and identity, made for women who are drawn to painful relationships and feel things more acutely than they can always explain. The accompanying residency at Bar Doña in Stoke Newington extended the project into performance, with each night retitled to reflect a different excess: Women Who Cry Too Much, Women Who Smoke Too Much, Women Who Think Too Much. The audience kept coming back.
Her influences are consistent and telling: Lola Young, Leonard Cohen, Lana Del Rey, Jeff Buckley, Sylvia Plath. Artists who understood that suffering, rendered precisely, becomes a form of company. Sofia writes from that same instinct. “God in my world is a woman,” she has said, “and the weakness or softness we possess, is a weapon.” It is the kind of line that clarifies an entire artistic project in one sentence.
If there is a useful shorthand for what Sofia and the Antoinettes sounds like, someone offered this one: if Sofia Coppola and David Lynch met at a flea market, found a dead woman’s love letters, and wrote a script together. It is a little baroque as descriptions go, but it is not wrong. There is that same quality of glamour pressed up against grief, of beauty that has been somewhere difficult.
The debut UK headline tour runs across two dates next month. Sofia plays Manchester’s Deaf Institute, The Lodge, on May 19, and London’s Hoxton Hall on May 20. Both venues suit her: intimate enough that the performance can breathe, significant enough to mark a real arrival. For an artist whose entire aesthetic is built around the act of leaving the house, these shows are the logical conclusion of the argument she has been making since the beginning. Getting dressed, walking out, standing in the light, and meaning every word.
