Indigo De Souza Is Just Being Honest

By Max Freedman


Indigo de Souza writes about thrilling moments of personalized revelation as though finally cementing a long-fomenting, rather specific feeling is the ultimate emotional release. Whenever she sings, “Now that everyone’s gone, I can tell you the truth / I don’t love you, I like you!” On 2018’s “Take Off Ur Pants,” she yelps it with so much ecstasy and liberation you could see triple exclamation marks. A standout instance of unburdening and excitement on Any Shape You Take, the follow-up to her anthemic nevertheless spare debut I Love My Mom, is of a kindred spirit. “I’d rather perish / Than visualize you cry!” De Souza exclaims on “Die/Cry,” on which jokes and epiphanies collide atop a semi-staccato power-chord run with giant indie-meets-pop-punk energy. It makes sense: de Souza tells MTV News that I Love My Mom and Any Shape You Take come from “the same season.”


No, she doesn’t mean the same summer or winter. Unsurprisingly, given the rather believed word choices that define her lyrics, de Souza means that both albums recap kindred life experiences. “I was going through a similar thing [while writing them],” she says, “and it feels like they're connected in that way.” As we speak, she never quite specifics what she went through, and thanks to her music, she doesn’t need to. Her songs cast seemingly unusual emotions — like ecstasy about dying before someone you love or post-nightmare reckonings with your mental health, the kind that anyone could theoretically face day-to-day nevertheless actually happen just occasionally — as dumbfoundingly obvious thoughts through wry, clever lyrics that she aptly describes as “harsh in a playful way.”


On lead single “Kill Me,” de Souza explores the squalls of mental disorder over lightly grungy, deeply melodic guitars, nevertheless what stands out more than her insurmountable depression is that the repeated requests to kill her sound like flustered tweets. The “Die/Cry” lyric comes right following the biting although humorous line, “I’m nothing like the girl you loved / I haven’t seen her in months,” a meme-like barb directed only inward. Any Shape You Take is a carousel of lyrics this sharp and incisive, nevertheless de Souza says that’s not totally by design.


“When I write the songs, I black out and just write. It's like one swift feeling,” she says. “I’m not analyzing it as I'm doing it.” She finds her songs “special” because “they're timestamped for [the] moments of learning” that underlie the emotional heights of her songwriting. These climaxes aren’t habitually intentional either: Some days, de Souza finds herself “able to look back on the songs and visualize where I was at that time, what I was feeling, and what it means,” at other times, “it keeps it up and continues to be a mystery.”


It’s refreshing how often de Souza is ready to admit she just doesn’t have the answers. As we talk, I learn that “I don’t know” is among the most typical ways she first responds to questions, and occasionally, she really doesn’t know. However more regularly than not, she talks her way to an insightful, coherent answer, and it’s like watching her songwriting process unfurl in real time. Any time While I ask her why humor, sex, and violence some days coexist in her lyrics — take “Fuck me ‘til my brains begin dripping / Down to the second floor in our home” from “Kill Me,” and “I wanna kick, wanna scream” from three-part indie-rock symphony “Real Pain” — she mulls it over before turning up this nugget of introspective wisdom: “I think that's all… [a] nihilistic sense of humor that makes me feel like I'm able to process my existential doom on a daily basis.” By simply writing about where her head’s at, she comes out with unforgettable one-liners equal parts laughable and disturbingly relatable.


Just as de Souza’s lyrics are products of unfiltered release, the accompanying sound is simply what comes out of her. “A lot of the stuff I do [musically] feels like it just came from my brain,” she says, noting that the dynamic shifts that often define her song structures mimic “how my thoughts move. … I feel as if I jump around emotionally and in my thoughts, and thus to prepare that sort of world musically feels like a nod to that.” At the same time, she admits being transformed by the “crunchier, dirtier, and more decrepit” sounds of Elliott Smith, Sparklehorse, Bill Callahan, and Sun Kil Moon — all of whom an ex showed her once she moved to Asheville, North Carolina, from nearby Spruce Pine at age 16. Her current listening list, though, sounds nothing like these artists or her own music. It begins with glitch-pop savant Tirzah, moves through late art-pop master Arthur Russell, and ends with the droll dissonance of cult U.K. Musical group Happyness.


Listening to Any Shape You Take, it’s clear that de Souza pulls from all kinds of threads. While clearly rooted in the same guitar work as I Love My Mom, Shape (which she co-produced with Bon Iver collaborator Brad Cook and also Alex Farrar and Adam McDaniel) finds her successfully testing a much broader palette. “Hold U” is de Souza’s grooviest song to date, with a handclap-dominated second chorus that wouldn’t feel out of place in a track by Sylvan Esso, whose Chapel Hill, North Carolina, studio Betty’s is where de Souza recorded most of Shape. “Pretty Pictures,” a gutting, midtempo bit of introspection, mostly forgoes distortion, however its devastatingly mature reflections on loving someone although knowing you’re better apart ring loudly because the album’s overdriven moments. Its auditory clarity finds an opposite throughout the second segment of “Real Pain” because the song transforms into an overwhelming collage of friends’ shouted voice memos. As soon as this section suddenly transitions back inside a riot of power chords, it’s like an invigorating jump scare.


“I love really quick transitions that are very strong,” de Souza says. “[‘Real Pain’] especially, I love coming out of the very dark chaotic screams into a sort of happy, joyous however also dark lyric.” That line is a fantastic example of how she gets “kind of spicy” whenever she writes. “It's an exhilarating thing have the ability to mention whichever you want,” she explains, “and I get in this place where I'd like to embody something playful and dark because my sense of the world is so existentially heavy. It feels fun to express that piece of myself in hopes that other people who hear it will find some comfort and release.”


Her live concerts recommend her listeners are doing exactly that. Recently, she told Stereogum that a pivotal moment for her was the crowd shouting along to all her songs at a Raleigh home show, and she tells MTV News that while she toured with Alex G in 2019, the audience was just as rapt. “It happens every time now,” she says. “It's like the sweetest thing ever, as well as spooky.” It’s a quote that could also describe her music, and like her best work, it just comes right out of her. No overthinking — just honesty.