Sophie Castillo Talks British Latinidad & Fusing Latin Sounds in Her Music

British Latina indie singer Sophie Castillo has always been in touch with her Cuban-Colombian roots even though she grew up in London. She remembers listening to salsa in the car with her mom and naturally grooving to the music. Castillo always dreamt of making her own music and began using TikTok and Instagram to gain visibility as an independent artist. Through the years, Castillo released her debut EP Venus last year, opened for Colombian reggaetonero J Balvin in London, and embarked on her first U.S. tour, showing how Latin music surpasses borders and even oceans. Today she released her second EP Like A Star, which centers around an otherworldly siren-like persona she’s created for the project and features the Latin musical influences she’s had throughout her life thanks, in part, to her immigrant family.

Castillo’s parents immigrated to the U.K. from their native countries in the ‘80s, met at a salsa club and bonded over their love of salsa and bugalú. Despite the distance between Latin America and the U.K., her family immersed her in Latin music and culture, raising her with Colombian artists like Grupo Niche, Joe Arroyo, and Fruko y sus Tesos. She recalls watching the 1997 film Selena and looking up to the late singer, which she says is a canon event for every young Latina. As a bicultural teen born and raised in London, Castillo also grew up listening to indie music through artists like Lana Del Rey, the Arctic Monkeys, and the Kooks. When she was 18 years old, she began seeking salsa music on her own.

“When I was young, I was like, ‘Mom, like, could we put something else?’ Then as I got older, I started to appreciate it. I remember being in the car and listening to salsa and just kind of feeling my body really naturally move. While I was listening to the music, I was like wiggling my toes and moving my hip muscles a little… Naturally it felt so instinctive to just kind of move your body and dance along,” Castillo tells HipLatina. “It really is such a physical and spiritual connection to the music. I just feel like there’s something about salsa that just makes me feel really primal and wild and free.”

While salsa was the soundtrack of Castillo’s home in her youth, she was heavily influenced by her all-time favorite artist Lana Del Rey, who she describes as her main musical inspiration. Moved by the singer-songwriter’s vulnerability and poetic lyrics, she explains that her music truly shaped her as a writer. Aspiring to become her own musician someday, Castillo learned how to produce songs at home with GarageBand, using Del Rey’s sound as a guide. Another huge influence is Welsh singer-songwriter Marina and the Diamonds, now known as MARINA, whose Electra Heart album deeply impacted her. As MARINA created a character named Electra Heart and archetypes for the album, Castillo was inspired to never approach a project or song without a concept or character which heavily influenced her latest album.

Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis also inspired her as a bilingual singer. Castillo loves her expressive lyrics about karma, self-love, and growth and says Uchis has been impactful for artists trying to do Spanglish music and praises her for showing all sides of herself in a “dreamy” and “divine feminine” sort of way. Through these inspirations, Castillo crafted her own unique sound, writing style, and creative vision as a musician, and despite lacking connections in the U.K. music industry, she carved a space for herself and met other Latinx creatives through her work.

According to Castillo, U.K. Latin artists are in “a very interesting and unique position.” While Latin music has taken off in the U.S., Latin America, and other countries around the world, it’s a growing genre in the U.K. As a result, getting industry support can be difficult since labels stick to a tried-and-true formula. Despite this, Castillo says there’s still a large community of U.K. Latin artists with room for everybody to shine. According to the London-based Latin American Bureau, at least 250,000 Latin Americans were living in the U.K. as of 2021. While Castillo found that her U.S-based fans were her most vocal group of supporters, she also noticed her U.K. audience growing and was pleasantly surprised at the amount of fans who came to her London headline show in January. 

“I always say that actually, the Brits are more open-minded than people give them credit for. Anytime that I have done shows, they’ve always been like ‘Oh my god, this is so cool… I love the Latin vibes,’” Castillo says. “The Brits, they love Afrobeats… I feel like next could be Latin music to have a wave. Hopefully, I’m trying to make it happen.”

While Castillo has enjoyed her journey as a creative, she’s faced many challenges that stood in the way of her success. As a passionate artist with a vision, she likes to be involved in everything career-wise, from the business side to the creative direction and production. Navigating the music industry in the U.K. as an independent artist, especially as a young woman of color, Castillo’s learned that people will manipulate, and take advantage of rising artists due to their inexperience. Because of this, she’s had to pull herself out of bad situations where she’s felt her art have been disrespected, and she’s learned to set firm boundaries as an artist, always read the fine print, and advocate for herself.

Despite the challenges she’s faced, Castillo’s reached significant milestones in her career. After gaining traction with “When The Sun Goes Down” and “Call Me By Your Name,” she released her debut EP Venus. Looking back, Castillo calls this as her “break free moment,” as she’d just gotten out of a toxic situation and felt proud that she accomplished so much after being stifled for so long. Through social media, she’s taken her future into her own hands by promoting her music on Instagram and TikTok instead of depending on a label to boost her career. For Castillo, this ability to market herself made her feel empowered and allowed her to slowly gain visibility as an artist. In 2024, she opened for J Balvin during his Que Bueno Volver a Verte tour at the O2 arena.

“It was just a dream come true, and I was very grateful to J Balvin and his team for reaching out and giving me the opportunity, and I think it was so nice because I feel like it’s the first time that a U.K. Latin artist has been given the opportunity to perform in an arena and open for such a huge artist in the O2 specifically, which is a very iconic arena that we have,” Castillo tells us. “I didn’t want to waste the shot; I was like ‘I got to make the most out of this,’ so [I] made sure I had all my bases covered and did everything that I could for it to go perfectly.”

Castillo’s most recent achievement is her freshly-concluded U.S. tour. After growing her American fanbase, they kept asking when she would do a tour here. Running from February to March, the self-funded tour featured shows in Miami, Dallas, SXSW in Austin, and Los Angeles and even sold out three shows. Castillo was most excited to meet and hear the stories of the fans who had shown her so much love through the years, saying she felt it was “such a dream come true.”

Her musical sound is a mix of salsa, pop, bachata, reggaeton, bossa nova, and baile funk. This has been intentional since the beginning of her career, as she wants her fans to expect anything “with that Sophie kind of dreamy touch.” While Castillo doesn’t have a single favorite genre, she enjoys doing indie bachata for its sensual sound, and going forward, she hopes to do more salsa tracks and tap into boleros and cumbias. Castillo has done songs fully in English and in Spanish, but most of her music is a mix of both—a deliberate decision on her part. Growing up alongside her Colombian family, Castillo speaks both languages and uses them interchangeably, and her goal is to normalize Spanglish music and celebrate bicultural identities.

“I really do have the intention to make Spanglish music a normal thing; I really want that for the world. I want people to just expect a bit of Spanish in a song,” Castillo says. “I want to make Spanglish music the normality and just show that you can be from both worlds. It feels most authentic to me because that’s how I am anyway.”

As a brown-skinned Latina with Indigenous features and roots from both sides of her family, Castillo recognizes the significance of the representation she can provide through her platform as a musician. In Latinx media in general, it’s far too common to see white Latinas put on a pedestal while Black and brown Latinas are often overlooked. For Castillo, representation and diversity in Latinidad is important, as she remembers being a little Latina girl who could only see herself in Disney’s Pocahontas growing up. Through her music, she hopes to be the representation she sought in her youth and make people like her feel “seen, understood, appreciated, and beautiful.”

That intention also informed her latest album, Like A Star which follows an out-of-this-world being, who she describes as “a force to be reckoned with,” that has come to earth with a mission. Having never experienced human emotions, she begins feeling things completely unfamiliar to her. Castillo says that the story is meant to represent anyone who has felt misunderstood, with her newest single “Supernova” representing the being’s entry point to earth, “The Betrayal” signifying her first heartbreak,” and closing track “Pa’ Volar” centering on her acceptance of the journey.

“She’s like a burning star,” Castillo explains. “Every song is like a different kind of emotion that she’s been through… I think a lot of people can relate to that story because there are so many people who feel misunderstood or feel like they don’t fit in… There’s so many people who can maybe relate to that feeling of being from another world and experiencing a new world.”