Leyla Sabo stepped into The Voice Australia as a 12-year-old Melbourne singer carrying more stage time than her age suggests. She said, “My blind audition, I was so nervous going onto the stage, and then, once I was singing, I was fine.”
The blind audition put her in front of Richard Marx, Melanie C, Ronan Keating and Kate Miller-Heidke, the four coaches on the show. For a young performer with an existing local profile, that is a jump from small-room gigs and support slots to a national TV stage watched in prime time.
Hard To Breathe
At 10, she released her first original song, Hard To Breathe, and she wrote it after her family dog passed away. “It was my family dog that passed away and it was really upsetting,” she said. “I was really sad. And then I just wrote some lyrics and it became a song.”
That gives her Voice appearance a different shape from a routine kids-singing audition. She is not arriving empty-handed; she is arriving with an original song, a recording history, and the kind of personal writing that usually shows up later in a performer’s career.
From eight to 13
She started performing when she was eight or nine, comes from a musical family, and said her mother, Annie, used to sing while her uncles play guitar. Leyla also said she sometimes feels older than 13. “When I’m around my friends, I can feel pretty young. But then I always feel mature around people my mum’s age. And when I connect with musical people, I feel like I really become part of the older crowd.”
That mix of age and experience is the point of interest here: she is young, but not new to the work. She recently supported Bonnie Anderson, and last Christmas she sang at a local carols event, where she said, “After I finished performing, I walked out and a bunch of people came running to me and I was like, ‘What?’”
Monday and Tuesday
The Voice airs on Monday and Tuesday at 7.30pm on Channel Seven and 7plus, so Leyla’s audition now sits inside a wider TV run rather than a one-off clip. She said, “Like, singing is my home,” and then added, “Like it’s all I do.”
The useful question from here is not whether she has stage experience; she clearly does. It is whether the blind audition gives her the televised breakout that her local record already suggests she can handle, or whether her run ends before the chairs move.
