RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 16 runner-up Sapphira Cristál is challenging us to live in the spirit of joy with her new album, The Cristál Ball. Her challenge isn’t one she takes lightly—she also practices what she preaches due to a lifetime of equal parts heartache and happiness.
When we first interviewed Cristál, it was Nov. 8, 2024, right after the monumental election of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States. With the country reeling from what could have been—the election of the first Black and Indian woman, Kamala Harris—we asked Cristál how she felt about the album coming out at a time when people needed to feel some levity.
“I don’t know that [the album] was built in preparation for this. I make my music, I do my art, and I feel like I am a conduit for the inspiration, for God to come and do His work, and I don’t really know the purpose of my work. I just know it has to be done. It has to be done well,” she said. “I will say that there’s always some time in the world that people don’t feel safe. They don’t feel like they’re enough. They don’t feel like they’re gonna make it. And this [album] is for that time.”
Cristál describes herself as “obnoxiously optimistic about life all the time,” and that feeling makes its way not just into her music, but into her personal philosophy.
“It’s not the way that I’m built to ever think, ‘Oh, the bad thing is gonna happen,'” she said. “I always think that the good thing is gonna happen. When things that seem like they’re bad happen, I try to find the opportunity for growth, the opportunity for fighting the power, for whatever is needed in that moment. So I’m glad that it’s coming out at the top of the year, ’cause it’s a good album for people to listen to when they need some inspiration. I had no plan on that [happening], but I’m not the one who makes all the plans, you know. I just put one foot in front of the other.”
Sapphira Cristál finds power in positivity and healing through music
The album was originally scheduled to be released in January, but since then, Cristál later told us that she’d been refining the album prior to its June 2025 release.
“I recorded most of The Cristál Ball last year and have spent the beginning of this year really fine-tuning everything. This is my debut album, so I want it to be the best it can be!” she said. “It’s all about being yourself, loving yourself, and expressing yourself. And part of that is maintaining awareness of where there is room to grow. Every time it seemed like the album might be done, I said, ‘Wait! One more thing.’ So I added some remixes, interludes, and a song that’s on tempo with my everyday vibe—’Vibin’!”
Cristál described the album in 2024 as “mainly a love album,” including self-love in the song, “Get Your Flowers”
“It’s one of those songs that is a love song to others, but also if you sing it to yourself in the mirror, it’s a love song to yourself,” she said. “Then there’s ‘After Hours,’ and ‘After Hours’ is kind of my love song to the music. It’s just like I am the rhythm. Not only do I love the rhythm, but I am the rhythm.”
Inside ‘The Cristál Ball’: themes of love, confidence and identity
Other songs on the album range from covering sadness due to love and a desire for better in a relationship, to the classic bitch track, to songs about telling others to “Keep It Cute” and don’t bring their mess into your life. The new song, “Vibin,” keeps the album’s theme of self-love, Cristál said recently.
“It’s unique in that it’s more personal than just my philosophy—it’s a literal glimpse into my vibe. It’s the only track that I didn’t co-write with Ocean Kelly (I wrote this one with Dan Weidlein), but it blends well with the rest of the songs on the album.”
The songs, and the depth of Cristál’s singing ability, show how influenced she is by other Houston greats like Yolanda Adams, Beyoncé and Lizzo. As Cristál said in our 2024 conversation, she used music as her escape from a difficult childhood.
“I had two parents in the house. They were very loving, but they did fight a lot, and my dad was not the nicest person in the world all the time. And when he wasn’t nice, it was not great,” she said. “I got picked on a lot in school for seemingly no reason other than the fact that I was adorable and everyone liked me [laughing], but I was a weirdo and people didn’t like the fact that people liked me because I was weird.”
Regardless, Cristál described herself as a “very happy kid growing up.” But when she was in trouble, she did have two things to help her. First, learning how to protect herself from her dad, a UFC trainer. And, of course, Cristál turned to music to help her release her anxiety and anger.
“I was able to go to the library and listen to Paul Robeson and get inspiration from that. I was in the gospel choir at church—I was the only kid in the choir at church. I started writing gospel songs while I was still in the choir,” she said. “Eventually, I went to high school for the performing visual arts, and that influenced my operatic and classical side of my life, which took over for quite a while because I love classical music, but I also love gospel music. There’s something about being able to inspire someone and make them shake their butt at the same time that gospel music can do that almost no other music can do.”
Why Sapphira Cristál says joy is a revolutionary act
However, despite finding an escape in music, Cristál did say that she recognized when she was dealing with life’s challenges in a similar way to her father.
“I had a moment in my life where I was mirroring the same behavior as my father, and I realized that I did not want to do that,” she said, describing how her father dealt with anger by shutting down through not talking or leaving.
“Sometimes he would stop talking to me for weeks, and he became abusive in a different way that wasn’t physical, but more mental,” she said. “I decided I did not wanna do that as well. I would explain how I felt and have many conversations.” But, she said, she still realized she was “angry all the time.”
“I was yelling…I might not have started the argument, but I finished it in a big way,” she said. “I had to go to anger management, and I had to basically be reminded of the things that I grew up with and the person that I was, which was a very happy person.”
“You can choose to be happy,” she continued. “Basically, we can choose everything…we can choose how we feel about it and say, ‘Okay, I don’t like this.’ This is great to acknowledge, but then you have to say, ‘How am I going to respond to this and how do I want to feel on the inside?’ …Never in the history of ever has wallowing and worrying and being so overwhelmed with grief made a difference.”
Encouraging fans to love themselves, just as they are
Her personal outlook has become her calling card, as fans saw during Season 16 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, when she counseled Plane Jane out of her uncharacteristic funk of self-doubt. Cristál said that she invites everyone to do what she instructed Plane Jane to do—write down your doubts and then destroy them.
“Write down your fears, tear them up, throw them behind you, burn them,” she said. “Write down everything you’re grateful for. Read it aloud. Say ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ It’s from a book called The Magic [by Rhonda Byrne], but it really works and gets your internal energy changed.”
“I try to stay on the positive and, no, I’m not perfect and I don’t succeed every single time, and I give myself room for that to happen as well, because I think it’s very important to not just push things to the side so that they can bubble up,” she said. “I think it’s important for people to realize their power and realize that you are enough.”
“I’ve been homeless, I’ve been heartbroken, I’ve been friendless, or at least it felt that way. I’ve been picked on a lot when I was a kid…I’ve been sexually molested as a kid,” she added. “I went through a lot and because I came out on the other side and because I was able to keep my faith and keep my optimism, [I am] a testimony that it can get bad, but right here [in your mind] is where it gets the worst, and you have the power here. You can really control some things in here. And then you can start controlling things around you because we are magnets. We want to attract the things that we desire and not the things we don’t desire, and that starts with our thoughts.”
Cristál ended our conversation with an exercise of holding our hands up, wiggling them, and then hugging ourselves, saying, “I truly love and accept myself.”
“I invite you to do that because it is a practice that I do,” she said. “It is a practice that I think is very necessary now as we’re going into whatever we’re going into. I think that remembering to truly love and accept who you are will help you make great decisions going forward. It’ll help you realize that you deserve what you deserve because you love you. When you truly love yourself, you really do expect the best from the world and you don’t settle for anything less.”
The Cristál Ball is now available for streaming at Spotify, Deezer, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, and for download from iTunes.
