Leyla Sabo stepped onto The Voice Australia stage at 12 with an original song written from grief and nerves, and came out of the moment sounding like a performer far older than her years. The Melbourne singer has since turned 13, but the blind audition captured her at the point where a local young talent moved into national television.
That is why the performance is drawing attention now. Sabo was singing in front of Richard Marx, Melanie C, Ronan Keating and Kate Miller-Heidke, four international superstars whose turns on the show can turn a school-age act into a name viewers remember. For anyone searching her performance today, the basic questions are the ones that matter most: what did she sing, how old was she when she filmed it, and did any coach turn?
The answer to the second part is clear. Sabo was 12 when she filmed the blind audition and has turned 13 since. She also arrived with a song that carried real weight for a child performer. Her first original, Hard To Breathe, was written after the death of her family dog. “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 backstory gives the audition its force. Sabo comes from a musical family, with Annie having sung and her uncles playing guitar, and she started performing when she was eight or nine. By 10, she had already released Hard To Breathe. She was not just a child stepping up for one televised song; she was a young singer who had already built a habit of performing and writing before the cameras arrived.
Even so, she admitted the stage still got to her. “My blind audition, I was so nervous going onto the stage, and then, once I was singing, I was fine,” she said. That shift matters because it shows where the pressure sat: not in the singing itself, but in the walkout, the waiting and the thought of four chairs that may or may not turn. Once she began, the nerves fell away.
Her recent momentum helps explain why the appearance lands now. Sabo recently supported Bonnie Anderson, who won Australia's Got Talent when she was 12, and she also sang at a local carols event last Christmas. After that performance, she said, “I walked out and a bunch of people came running to me,” and added that she “did not expect that at all.” She said she “really enjoyed it,” especially because “it was mostly young people, and just seeing them inspired by me is so amazing.”
That is the tension inside her story: a singer young enough to feel “pretty young” around her friends, but already moving comfortably in settings that belong to older, more experienced performers. She said she feels mature around people her mum’s age, and that when she connects with musical people she feels like she really becomes part of the older crowd. Singing, she said, is her home. It is also where she sounds most settled.
What remains unresolved is simple. The audition put Sabo in front of The Voice’s coaches, but the available details do not say whether any of them turned. For now, that is the part viewers are left to look for when the show airs on Mondays and Tuesdays at 7.30pm on Channel Seven and 7plus.
