Sofia Portanet

Spanish-German pop singer/songwriter Sofia Portanet blends new wave and synth pop with operatic vocals while performing across several languages. She entered the world in Kiel, Germany, on the date the Berlin Wall came down and spent her childhood in Paris as the daughter of revolutionary singer/songwriter and poet António Portanet, whose two albums appeared on Decca and EMI during the 1970s and 1980s before he sustained a modestly successful recording career well into the 2000s.

Portanet spent five years in the Paris National Opera Children's Chorus and studied piano for three years, yet stopped once she realized she wanted to avoid both the stress and the requirement of reading notation. Relocating to Berlin in 2010 specifically to build a professional music profile, she assembled a band, began performing regularly, and steadily gained attention on the city's club circuit. Drawing from Kate Bush, Edith Piaf, Lene Lovich, and Nina Hagen among others, she has also drawn stylistic comparisons to Goldfrapp and Tanya Donelly. Her first single, "Freier Geist" ("Free Spirit"), arrived in 2018; additional releases followed, and within a few years she collected multiple "best newcomer" prizes while appearing at international festivals such as SXSW.

Issued in July 2020 on the Berlin-based independent label Duchess Box, her self-titled debut album Freier Geist featured vocals in German, English, and French. Possibly influenced by her father's earlier work setting Lorca's poems to music, the lyrics drew on the legacy of German poets Heine, Rilke, and Goethe. Over the ensuing years she issued further singles to maintain momentum, among them a piano rendition of "Real Face" that included Chilly Gonzales. In 2022 she joined forces unexpectedly with thrash metal band Kreator for the track "Midnight Sun," which was included on their album Hate Über Alles. Her second album, Chasing Dreams, followed in March 2024 and introduced Spanish into her linguistic range through a cover of her father's "Coplas" ("Verses").