Sofía Gabanna is a voice choreographed by the page

The Buenos Aires-born Gabanna began dancing at four, training in classical ballet and flamenco, and by the age of five she was performing on stage. For more than a decade, her world was built on repetition, control, and physical precision.

Dance was the structure through which everything else made sense – and for a long time, that structure felt permanent. She dreamed of a future inside it: teaching, touring, moving through companies, living a life where progress followed a clear and recognisable path. “I imagined that I was going to be a ballet teacher, a professional dancer,” she tells me. “That was the life I imagined for myself.”

It was a future grounded in certainty but it didn’t last – during adolescence, dance disappeared from her life almost entirely, along with the sense of direction it had provided. Writing remained: diaries, poems, fragments, things written without an audience in mind. That relationship to language eventually found a home in rap, as a structure flexible enough to hold excess. “I don’t know if I’m so much a rapper,” Gabanna explains, “but I consider myself a writer. I hope I don’t die without writing a book. Poets like Alejandra Pizarnik fascinate me. Clarice Lispector, too.”

Since releasing her first track at eighteen, Gabanna has built a body of work that resists easy categorisation but touches the world of urban music, boom bap, g-funk, and jazz. Her debut album Sideral ebbs and flows between English and Spanish as she melts genres together and wields introspective lyricism. Gabanna is also the sister of Nathy Peluso, a connection that sits adjacent to, rather than inside, her own creative trajectory.

If Gabanna’s early years were defined by structure, adolescence arrived as its opposite. More as a gradual shift than a rupture. “Fourteen marked a before and after in my life,” she says. “I disconnected a lot from everything.” The certainty that had once organised her days disappeared quickly, and with it the habits that had held everything in place. Dance and studying fell away, and the rhythm of progress she had known since childhood stopped making sense.

There is no attempt, in the way she speaks about that period, to dramatise it or soften it. “I stopped doing many things I loved,” she says, matter-of-factly. The loss wasn’t teenage rebellion but disorientation: a long stretch where direction was absent and nothing rushed in to replace it. What remained was writing: “I was always connected to writing,” Gabanna tells me. “Poems, blogs, diaries.”

Rap entered her life later, but its appeal was immediate because it solved a practical problem. “When I discovered rap, that’s when I connected writing with music,” she says. “I started composing in a very visceral way.” For Gabanna, rap didn’t impose limits on how much could be said or how directly it could be expressed but made room for excess; anger, confusion, and repetition.

Everything she made in those early years was intended for her early ears only. “I wrote a lot,” she says. “Many songs that nobody knows, and they’ll never be known.” She laughs to herself as she stares away, reminiscing about those early recordings.

When Gabanna finally did decide to share a song publicly, the response came quickly. “Fui Silencio” marked a shift in her core. It was the green light she was looking for to speak outwardly instead of only inwardly. “Rap let me do my catharsis,” she says. What developed during this period was a catalogue of songs that spread her name across the music scene. Even as her music would eventually expand outward into melody and other genres, the foundation remained the same. Rap was where her voice learned how to exist in public; singing arrived much later, and with far more hesitation. “I don’t sing because I think I sing amazingly,” she smiles. “I sing because I like it and because I feel good doing it.”

Her experience as a performer both in dance and music translates to a live show that feels so lived in. In 2025, this landed her incredible opportunities both in Spain and to return to South America for the biggest shows of her career. Her next show will be at Eurosonic Noorderslag in January where she’ll perform alongside the most exciting musicians coming out of the Catalan music scene, including CLARAGUILAR, Lia Kali and LLUM.

That shift didn’t happen overnight. Shame played a role, as it often does when an artist moves beyond the identity they are known for. “Before I was very embarrassed to sing,” she admits. “I sang anyway, but in a much more inhibited way.” What changed wasn’t her range or technique, but her relationship to restraint. “This year I let myself loosen up,” she says. “And I started enjoying it much more.”

Her recent EP Jazz Sessions – released back in April – is a collaboration with local Catalan musicians and reimagines some of her songs as much more subdued and quietly confident interpretations. “Those sessions allowed me to touch a style I’ve loved since I was little,” she explains, “like jazz, blues, tango.”

After years of moving between discipline, collapse, and release, she speaks about her present with a sense of acceptance rather than urgency. “Because I disconnected so much from myself earlier, my connection with who I am came later. That’s why I’m still discovering myself today," says Gabanna.

That openness extends to how she thinks about the future: “Right now I don’t really know where I want to go,” she says. “Because suddenly I want to do many things. And I like that.”

There is also a noticeable distance between her and the idea of scenes or trends. Her reference points often sit decades back rather than alongside her. “My Spotify Wrapped told me I’m 69 years old,” she admits. What ties her output together now isn’t genre or tempo, but a consistent relationship to writing and feeling. Rap remains present and singing remains open. None of it is framed as a pivot but is all part of the same process of allowing Gabanna to shapeshift, subvert, and succeed.