Background and career
Stella Lefkofsky (born August 13, 2002), better known by her stage name Stella Lefty, is an American singer-songwriter. Her 2026 country-pop single "Boston" peaked at number two on the US Billboard Hot 100.
Stella Lefkofsky was born on August 13, 2002, and was raised in Glencoe, Illinois. Her father is billionaire businessman Eric Lefkofsky, a co-founder of Groupon and Mediaocean and the founder and CEO of Tempus AI. Lefty started writing songs and taking guitar lessons as a child but initially did not perform publicly because of her stage fright. She grew up listening mostly to country and pop musicians, including Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Tim McGraw, and Brad Paisley. After graduating from New Trier High School, she attended Tulane University in 2020 to study public health, with "no plan of doing anything in music". Lefty graduated from Tulane University in 2024. She is a sister of Pi Beta Phi. While studying abroad in Amsterdam, she began sharing her earliest song compositions on TikTok.
In 2022, Lefty began posting videos of her singing song covers and original songs to her TikTok account. In 2024, she released her debut single "Kiss Me", which gained popularity on TikTok. Record producer J Kash soon messaged her online and the two began collaborating after she moved to Los Angeles. She released her debut extended play (EP) Tragic, Really, in 2025. In January 2026, she released the single "Thinkin' Bout You", which she wrote in collaboration with friends Grace Enger and Sadie Jean. Her song "The Kill" was released in February of that year as part of the soundtrack for the film Scream 7. Shortly thereafter, she signed with Atlantic Records' country music imprint, Atlantic Outpost. In 2026 her country pop single "Boston" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart at number 95 in April and climbed to the top-20 a month later. In May 2026, she released her second EP, Is This Heaven?, which featured the previously-released songs "Boston", "Thinking 'Bout You", and "I Know I Know" and a collaboration with Vincent Mason, "Something to Lose". Is This Heaven? debuted at number 38 on the Billboard 200 chart and at number nine on the Top Country Albums chart with 20,000 units sold. In March 2026, it was announced that Lefty would perform as an opening act for Tucker Wetmore's Brunette World Tour. Lefty quietly dropped out of those dates without explanation before posting an apology to her Instagram stories for having not announced her departure from the tour earlier. Lefty was nominated for Best New Artist and Best Country (for "Boston") at the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards. Her debut studio album Long Way Home was released on August 21, 2026. For The Guardian, Laura Snapes gave the album two out of five stars, calling Lefty's songwriting on it "stunningly unremarkable" and the album overall "indistinct and trope-ridden", while Abby Jones of Paste gave it a "D-" rating for its "tragically nearsighted" perspective, "painfully unimaginative" formula, and "unremarkable instrumentals". Lefty announced her Long Way Home Tour, set to begin in January 2027. Lefty performed at the Grand Ole Opry for the first time in September 2026. The same month, it was reported that she had parted with Disruptor Management, which she had been in partnership with "since the beginning of her career." On October 23, 2026, Lefty and Bailey Zimmerman are set to release a song together entitled "My Kinda Love" for the soundtrack of the third season of Nobody Wants This.
Lefty's music has been described as country, with her describing the genre as "what I love with my fucking heart and soul" while expressing ambivalence toward performing it despite not being from the South. She has described her voice as raspy. For The New Yorker, Brady Brickner-Wood described Lefty's singing voice as an affected "raspy Southern twang" and her songs as "projecting the uncomplicated joy of a wide-eyed college graduate who goes to the bar on the weekends and falls in love at first sight".
As of July 2026, Lefty is in a relationship with fellow singer-songwriter Vincent Mason.
Upon her rise to fame in mid-2026, Lefty was widely criticized online as both a "nepo baby" and an "industry plant" due to her father's billionaire status, with many claiming that the opportunities she had been given were solely a result of her family's wealth and that the success of her song "Boston" had been manufactured. Adam Alpert, Lefty's manager and the founder of Disruptor Records, stated in response to the criticisms that "industry plants don't exist" and that those who were deemed as such had just made "great songs that people like".
