“I’m always undergoing intense changes”: the pop visions and personal upheaval of Indigo De Souza’s ‘Precipice’

Indigo De Souza has a habit of taking phrases that sound doomy and turning them into life-affirming mantras. She did that with the title of her last album, 2023’s ‘All Of This Will End’: a cry of despair that’s also a reminder to enjoy the things you love while you can. And she does it again with her newest record, ‘Precipice’. Maybe it conjures images of standing on a crumbling clifftop, but maybe it’s also about being on the edge of a breakthrough and diving right in.

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“I feel like I’m always undergoing really intense changes – really quick shifts into totally different realities,” De Souza says now, speaking over Zoom from a back porch amid tour rehearsals. “I’ve had so many wild ups and downs within relationships in my life, and within my body and my brain. I think I just liked that idea of always being on the precipice of something new, and it being really scary but also finding ways to embrace it and see it as a positive thing.”

De Souza first broke out with her unique style of open-hearted indie-rock – combining grungey guitars with casually profound lyricism and astonishing vocals – in Asheville, North Carolina, where she’d lived since she was 16. She signed to the respected indie label Saddle Creek Records after the release of her first record, 2018’s ‘I Love My Mom’, and more acclaim followed with the two excellent follow-ups, 2021’s ‘Any Shape You Take’ and ‘All Of This Will End’, which both dealt with the heavy intricacies of heartbreak and mental health struggles. But with ‘Precipice’, she wanted to do something different, and headed to Los Angeles with the intention of making an all-out pop album.

“I had this romantic idea in my head: I’ll go to LA, find some producer and all my pop visions will come to life”

“I love pop music, and I love the way it makes me feel,” she says, mentioning Charli XCX, Mura Masa and, a little sheepishly, Justin Bieber as a few current favourites. “I really needed a break from writing albums that are sad and heavy, and diving into really deep, dark subjects. I wanted to write something that embodied the feeling of joy that pop music gave me.”

This doesn’t mean that ‘Precipice’ is all airy escapism. There are certainly some light, tongue-in-cheek moments, like the way ‘Crush’ combines double entendres about oral sex with the giddiness of new love. But most of the record is as piercing and raw as De Souza has ever been – it’s just that confessions of crushing heartbreak like ‘Crying Over Nothing’ and musings on mortality like ‘Not Afraid’ are cloaked in bouncy rhythms and infectious synth refrains. Instead of watering down her emotions, she uses the melodrama of pop to magnify them.

De Souza sees it as “a practice in simplifying”. “Instead of speaking in riddles or in metaphors, I just speak in exactly the words that would make the most sense,” she says. “I felt like, how special would it be to write a song that has super meaningful lyrics that hopefully would help someone through something, but also sounds so accessible that a wider audience could hear it and get something from it?”

“I wanted to write something that embodied the feeling of joy that pop music gave me”

Flying out to meet with producers and embark on co-writing sessions for the first time, De Souza saw Los Angeles as a glamorous new start. “I had this romantic idea in my head: I’ll go to LA and it’ll be the big city and I’ll find some pop producer and all my pop visions will come to life,” she laughs. “And yeah, I mean… that is what happened.”

The producer in question ended up being Elliott Kozel, who’s worked with Finneas, Lizzo, Yves Tumor and a host of other big names. He was the first producer De Souza met with, and she instantly felt she had found a musical soulmate. “I left that day feeling so excited, like I’d created this collaboration with someone that I knew was gonna be really important,” she says. “We got really deeply into this flow together – to the point where it really felt like we kinda had one mind. We didn’t even have to talk anymore, we’d just be in the room giggling and making crazy voices and playing things.”

Working with Kozel in LA, where she was sheltered from the dramas and heartbreaks of her history in North Carolina, De Souza started to feel like she was “on a vacation” from her real life. “I felt anonymous, and like anything was possible in this brand new world,” she says. A matter of months after finishing the album, though, reality came crashing hard.

Last September, De Souza was on tour when the news came that North Carolina had been devastated by Hurricane Helene. Phone service and electricity back home was down, so De Souza and her bandmates were unable to reach any loved ones. They were contractually obligated to play that night’s show and a few others before they could get back home. When she did return, De Souza found that her home – a converted church in which she regularly hosted acoustic shows or art events – had been destroyed.

De Souza and her roommates were forced to camp while they figured out more permanent shelter. Strangely, she looks back on those times fondly: Friends from the local community would come to the camp and they would cook together, play board games, and help each other through that debilitating time.

“That is something that I will always hold really dear to my heart, the way that people banded together and just had so much love and openness towards each other,” she says. “It was really, really special.” She also set up a Gofundme, which raised $30,000 before it was closed. “I am blown away by how beautiful my community is, both online and in the physical world,” she wrote on the website in response.

De Souza headed out to LA again to make another new album that dealt with the destruction of her home and the emotional fallout, which she hopes to release early next year. “It is definitely not like ‘Precipice’,” she says. “I started writing more grungey and experimental songs – more back to my roots.” With most of her belongings now fitting into a suitcase, she realised she didn’t want to go back to Asheville, where she only spent her time wishing she could be in LA collaborating with Kozel anyway. She’s now living in LA permanently.

The title of ‘Precipice’ turned out to be prophetic: De Souza was on the verge of not just a different musical direction, but an entirely new life. “Every time we would record I knew we were doing something really special, and I knew that it was leading to something, but I didn’t know what,” she says. “Ultimately, this album is what led me to shift my life in such a big way that I ended up moving across the country.” Based in the heart of the American music industry and with a new, bigger label in Loma Vista, the release of the record sees her on a new precipice – perhaps of indie-pop stardom, or continued experimentation and collaboration. Whatever comes of it, it’s exciting to watch De Souza take the plunge.

Indigo De Souza’s album ‘Precipice’ is out now via Loma Vista

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