Indigo De Souza’s Productive Quarantine Puts Us All to Shame

Indigo De Souza, breakout indie garage-pop artist from Asheville, North Carolina, is coming out of quarantine with a hopeful attitude and a new album. De Souza’s 2018 debut album, I Love My Mom, showcases the singer’s impressive vocal and emotional range in only ten tracks, most not more than four minutes long. If you were to listen to the record through the full 35 minutes, you’d get a visceral glimpse into the emotional rollercoaster of emerging from girlhood; requited and unrequited love, conversations with past and present selves, and so much more. The singer-songwriter’s lyrics are refreshingly vulnerable and tangibly honest. As a listener, there’s no pleasure quite like being taken into someone’s mind so openly that you could almost walk around in their feelings. Not only is De Souza a master at telling the truth, but singing along to her music makes you feel in sync with the oscillations of her emotional state. Her voice can remain soft or pick up with incredible power and progress into a cathartic scream. De Souza’s powerful voice has a theatrical quality and varies between inflections with grace and ease.

“Take Off Ur Pants,” the second track on I Love Your Mom, has a defiant energy that speaks to the familiar adolescent feelings of waiting for your life to begin or not knowing where you are in relation to your peers. Keeping “Take Off Ur Pants” in your headphones makes you feel like even though you can’t break out into a shriek and let out everything you’re feeling, you can live vicariously through De Souza’s soulful wails and punctuated sentences. The high intensity of tracks like “Take Off Ur Pants” and “This Is How I Get Myself Killed” is contrasted with slower, more brooding tracks like “Smoke.” “Good Heart,” the third track on the record, is softer and beautifully represents the tension between trying to see the best in the person you have your eyes on while trying to see the best in yourself. Like many of De Souza’s songs, it changes tempo, volume, and intensity throughout; De Souza is skilled at facilitating a surrender to the emotion she is experiencing. All of De Souza’s tracks use pent-up emotion and vulnerability to orchestrate a rise and fall in the emotions of the listener, using simple phrasings like “I’m nothing but trouble, watching you sleep,” that are both highly relatable and beg to be sung along to. 

De Souza has released one or more projects a year for almost every year since 2016, including a neo-soul project with Ethan Baechtold, Icky Bricketts. Talking about her prolific nature, she revealed that her album was conceived almost exclusively over quarantine: “during the pandemic, I wrote so many songs and I wrote like two albums worth of songs and am already planning out the next album.”

Recently, De Souza has been living in a rural town outside of Asheville: “it has a lot of farmland and woods, and rivers, which has felt much better, during the pandemic. I felt as a lot of people did. I felt like I needed to be away from people.” However, as the world opens up and she prepares for her upcoming tour, De Souza has taken time for herself away from music: 

“No, I haven't written a lot since I've moved here. I think just because I have so many new friends and so many new community events to go to and yeah, just, I'm part of a really vibrant community of people. And so that takes a lot of energy to uphold that. And I'm always wanting to dance and engage with everyone. And so I actually feel like I haven't written as much as I did before, because I'm so distracted, but it's a good kind of distracted. And that's kind of how my songwriting normally works. It's like, I don't write for a long time, and then I do start writing again. And I write lots of songs during that period.”

Three years after releasing her first full album, indie powerhouse Indigo de Souza is gearing up to release her second full-length project. De Souza’s second record, Any Shape You Take, is set to be released in 2021, with two singles already out. “Hold U” and “Kill Me” are from different eras in De Souza’s life as an artist, but they hint at another powerful record:“I've just been meeting so many beautiful people and really connecting deeply. And I’m just in a really special, celebratory, uplifting community of people who really care about their bodies and about each other,” says De Souza about where she’s spent the last leg of her quarantine. Her words about her new community are reflected in the warm energy of the music video for “Hold U,” which starts out with De Souza singing into the camera and gradually expands to her friends settling into a room and erupting into a dance party. In a statement, De Souza said she “wanted to write about a simple kind of love that isn’t necessarily romantic, but that is just about holding space for other people to fully express themselves and feel celebrated.”

Not only is the intensity of De Souza’s music magnetic, the album artwork on I Love My Mom and now Any Shape You Take are paintings done by her mom. De Souza gushed about her mom’s talent as a visual artist, and how the world doesn’t see her mom’s work because of her lack of internet presence. Using her mom’s work as album covers both speaks to the strength of their connection and brings exposure to her mom’s work. “I’m constantly aware of my mom’s mortality in a really heavy way,” says De Souza, “so it feels just like a really special thing to have those paintings live on forever.” 

De Souza came up with the ideas for the album artwork through visions that she had, which she then communicated to her mom. “Both times it's been a really cool surprise because I think I imagine it in my head as almost like a 3D world that I'm actually in,” says De Souza, “that's also what I love about her paintings is that the way she paints and thinks about visual stuff is so different from me. So it's very fun to see what comes from the imagery that I give her.”

The album is being released on August 27th via indie label Saddle Creek, home to other rising artists such asTomberlin, Hop Along, Bright Eyes, Big Thief, and Adrianne Lenker. De Souza also co-produced Any Shape You Take with Brad Cook and will be touring around the United States this fall and upcoming spring.  Indigo De Souza is playing the Big Room Bar in Columbus on September 28th, 2021, with The Ophelias, just over an hour from the Kenyon campus!

– Isla Hamblett