Indigo De Souza: The Most Versatile Artist at the Moment
Listening to music with my significant other is one of the simplest pleasures yet one I always find an exponential amount of peace in. My music taste stubbornly leans more towards Playboi Carti, James Brown, and The Rolling Stones. My girlfriend, with her stormy blue eyes and smile that warms any soul that sees it-- always fills the car or room with Hippocampus, Mitzkie, and Lorde. All the soft alt-rock sounds that I wouldn't be able to find on my own make a summer sunset go on forever, or bring our warm bodies closer on an autumn day. One of the artists she's introduced me to unknowingly is Indigo De Souza.
Indigo De Souza is a 24-year-old singer and songwriter based in North Carolina. She is perfectly helped by a band under the same name to create vulnerable masterpieces. Her discography is both healing and terrifying, like going on a roller coaster ride and being hit with feeling the most alive one could ever feel.
Her sad songs though? Brutal. Like a teary round of vodka on a down, dimly-lit night and also like (in the nicest way possible) the drunken cry that follows it. Each note feels on the edge of being emotionally spent, and it truly feels like her heart will break if she continues further, or as if her voice, in the most literal sense, will break.
Handling such a raw and powerful voice, as in knowing how to accompany it with instruments, is not an easy task. Yet Indigo’s band members Owen Stone (bass), Ethan Baechtold (guitar), and Jake Lenderman (drums), do just that and do so perfectly. There’s very few things more satisfying than hearing Jake’s drums build up alongside De Souza’s voice. She knows exactly how to break hearts and she’s picked the perfect accomplices to do just that.
Her 2018 album “I Love my Mom”, brings me at a loss for words with each listen. Which is always for the best, because for an album like this, the best thing to do is just shut up and listen-- and good god is it incredible. Lyrically and sonically, this project will rock you to your core. A fair warning, however, it is an absolutely heartbreaking album. While I consider myself a much happier person than I’ve been in months prior, every listen humbles me as I hold back tears on rainy day drives. If this album was nothing more than “Sick in the Head”. “What Are We Gonna Do Now?”, and the transition between the two songs, it would still be one of the best bodies of work put out in the past 5 years.
And that’s exactly the best way to describe “I Love My Mom”, a body of work. No senses are left untouched, as Indigo De Souza’s voice comes for each and every one of them.
As a writer, a song’s lyrics will stick with me forever. Not necessarily lyrics that are Shakespearean masterpieces, but also the way the singer says them matters just as much if not more. Indigo’s voice is at times a menacing white-water current, yet she perfectly incorporates her words with the tone of the song. And as descriptive as I could possibly get about her voice, you seriously have to hear it for yourself, her Audiotree live performances are perhaps the greatest showcase of this. The closest comparison could possibly make is Kate Bush or Hope Sandoval. Returning to lyrics, however, there’s not one line that feels lazy or feels like filler. This is an excerpt from “Sick in the Head”:
“And there was no one home in that plastic box
In that widow's womb with the childproof locks”
I must have replayed this song the most out of any, simply just for this gem of a line.
De Souza has cited her background as in the past, as a frustrated creative soul trapped in a small conservative, a solitude that was not helped by being mixed-- feeling, looking and sounding different in that setting. And it appears that she has found the perfect outlet to vent all those years of frustration. For a time in history where frustration is a universally shared feeling, Indigo De Souza is a welcome sound. Their sonic cry of isolation, disappointment is both deeply personal and still relatable, which is an incredibly rare balance.
While I have gone in-depth at how raw and unique Indigo’s voice is at times, it’s also incredibly smooth when it needs to be-- which makes the other instances that much more powerful. It is the kind of voice that can really fit any genre, and breaking from her rock and neo-soul background, De Souza effortlessly creates an R&B work of art with “never 4get me”. Although it has been two years since Indigo and her group have put out an album, I wait eagerly for whatever they’ll bless the distant future with. Yet, what they’ve put out now is enough to continually give new life.