At Sofia Isella’s eighth birthday party, all the mums in attendance each bought her a journal. In a showcase of dazzling intuition, from them as well as her, she labelled one for “songwriting”. The contents of the journals that came thereafter – as well as the discordant, creepy tracks they’re set to – resulted in Isella’s cult following, which has particularly resonated with female fans online.
The Los Angeles-raised, Queensland-based singer’s sharp observations about the modern world are wrapped in a balm of poetry and pop, and took off on TikTok so much that her 2023 single ‘Hot Gum’ has racked up over 10million streams. Her songs would reach far beyond fans online when she was invited to support Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium in August – an experience she recalls with semi-religious fervour.
“I’m actually not sure how she found me, but she was just the kindest person I’ve ever met,” she says of Swift. “If I learned every single adjective to describe it, I couldn’t reiterate it. Not only just for my own experience, but just for Taylor’s legacy. If I think about her career long enough, I’ll just start crying.”
It was the perfect prelude to the September 6 release of her debut EP, ‘I Can Be Your Mother’, whose overarching themes often parallel Swift’s own lyrical interests: “I love talking about fame, and I love talking about women,” she says. “Those two, really, they keep coming back to me.” Isella approaches the topic with the compulsive curiosity of someone unable to tear their eyes away from a car crash: “How fame affects women has always been one of most fascinating topics to me since I was little, because people treat famous people fucking weird.”
It’s a strange thing to straddle: while her music has a huge presence on social media, it can act as a barrier when she plays live. In London, she walked into the crowd for the first time and experienced that firsthand: “It was the first headline show where these people actually know who I am. I’m walking around in a sea of phones while singing about technology.”
At the intersection of all her interests, be it Swift, stardom, or even the brief religious phase she had when she was seven, sits her sound: haunting, hushed, and always lyrically brutal. Now, Isella speaks to NME about her “unsettling” aesthetic, her complicated relationship to social media, and her dream collaborators.
Credit: Lily Miranda
How did your need to be creative manifest when you were younger?
“I was so annoying, so loud. I was the most fucking weird kid. I had a religious period when I was seven, and I had this thing called a ‘god basket’ where I was filling it with gold glitter, and I’d sit in the middle of a hotel lobby, sprinkle gold glitter around me and scream ‘om’ at the top of my lungs until my mom was like, ‘shut up!’
“Homeschooling gave me a lot of opportunities to be bored, which I think is one of the most important things. Boredom is what made me have the ability to write three songs [a day] because I didn’t have a phone until I was 16.”
The artwork for your EP features you with a pregnant belly on your back. What inspired that visual?
“I think visuals are very important. Pregnancy, I was thinking that was the kind of object I wanted to play around with and move. I remember, I was just in the hallway and I was like, ‘it should be in the back. It’s like, pregnant with a career’. Like, there’s two ways to be pregnant and you’re pregnant from the career that you’re growing, pregnant with yourself. That’s kind of where I was feeling with that. I loved the unsettlingness of it.”
On being somewhat unsettling, your sound is often likened to Billie Eilish or Melanie Martinez – how do you feel about comparisons to your alt pop predecessors?
“I love Billie. I remember listening to ‘You Should See Me in a Crown’, and I was crying because I was like, ‘this is so good’. It was such a mind-blowing new thing to see. I love the comparisons that I get. I think that everyone is different, but also, I get comparing [me to other] to people. And I think, really, it’s an incredible compliment.”
“I’ve always been very careful with myself because of how people treat famous people”
Who are some of your dream collaborators?
“I mean, Billie is just one of those iconic people. I love Billie, I love Trent Reznor, I love Ethel Cain. I’m usually a very solo type of creator, but there are some exceptions to that rule where I’m just like, ‘oh, you’re just you’re just phenomenal. You’re just so insane.’
“I love [Cain’s] aesthetic. She’s so good at visuals, and so good at creating a whole world that I think is so important. The sonics of some of her things are just so haunting. I listen to them on night drives, and it’s just a crazy, very unique sonic and whole world she’s got going on.”
Do you find yourself pulling inspiration from real life interactions when you write songs that are heavy on social commentary?
“Sometimes – sometimes I’m just making shit up. The thing about writing that kind of freaked me out is that I’ll be writing something that’s, to me, totally untrue. Then a month later I’ll be like, ‘oh, that’s what I was writing about’. Or I was predicting the future in some weird, very specific way. So I’m kind of careful what I make up.”
The content you do share with fans on YouTube and TikTok is often done in short bursts. Is that done consciously, in light of your relationship to social media?
“This is kind of a topic I’ve never really talked about. I’ve always been very careful with myself, [because of] how people treat famous people, and just me wanting to be at an arm’s length. There’s two aspects of this. One, trying to hold onto my own sanity and my own self, and at the same time, giving them – especially the hardcore people – more.
“I have this private Instagram account, and that’s for people who ever find it, so they have things earlier. They have a snippet of a song, they always see the artwork before anyone else does and we have our own little inside jokes. And it’s a great community. But I also like keeping parts of myself that might not necessarily need to be [out there, private].”
Credit: Lily Miranda
Do you feel like you’re at a point where you have created a completed world, visually and otherwise, for yourself?
“I think I’m always trying to be more specific, and I watch what I do. I watch and monitor what people associate with me when they make mood boards of what they think my vibe is. I always like seeing what they’re interpreting from whatever I’m putting out, which is always really interesting. Seeing if they’re getting what I’m trying to put out, or if they’re taking it a different way.”
What’s on the Sofia Isella Pinterest board then?
“Pinterest is the one social media app that I stand behind. I love Pinterest, I never feel depressed when I come out of Pinterest! It’s very black and white, creepy. Just like, wet. That’s an adjective to describe me: Black and white and wet.”
Sofia Isella’s ‘I Can Be Your Mother’ is out now. She plays Los Angeles today and San Diego tomorrow and will open for Melanie Martinez’s The Trilogy Tour in Ireland and the UK
English (US) · 