In her 1962 poem Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath wrote, “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / and eat men like air.” It’s part threat, part revenge fantasy, and part raw confession of the narrator’s fury toward a patriarchal world. That visceral, ferocious energy is what first drew SOFIA ISELLA to Plath, and it’s a force she channels frequently in her own music.
“The gore in womanhood [has] always been something that's interested me,” the 20 year old songwriter told me. “It’s so normalized… it doesn't feel weird to be expressing it that way [in my art].”
Isella doesn’t flinch from the horror stitched into the fabric of the feminine experience. Citing writers like Plath, Margaret Atwood, and Mona Awad as germinal influences on her lyricism, Isella plunges into the underbelly of expectations of good-girlhood, of valiant womanhood. In her songs she splays out the stakes of it all, plumbing the viscera, unearthing the blood, guts, dirt, and decay lurking beneath. “Drink the dolls / Legs spread like butter / We are wife, whore, mistress, maid, mother,” she chants on her 2024 song “The Doll People”. “The beauty and the buyer, take the screaming one because / A woman who doesn’t want it is much hotter than one that does.”
Isella’s creative fascination with horror began early. Raised in the United States and homeschooled around the world throughout childhood, Isella started writing lyrics at eight years old. “I have ten notebooks now, and I went through every single one and watched the progression,” she said. “They started out super, hyper dark…writing about Henry VIII and his six wives and talking about how they'll be beheaded and then talking about murdering a man for not loving me back.”
Poetry and lyricism were Isella’s first creative passions, but as her writing developed, her relationship with music began to shift too. While she started out playing classical violin, being homeschooled meant she was somewhat cut off from the slipstream of teenage pop culture (“I didn't have a phone until I was 16,” she explains), that is until a babysitter introduced her to Ariana Grande on the drive to lessons. “My mom didn't want me to listen to the Selena Gomez album, so I had to make an essay on every single song and why it was beneficial to me,” she said. “If there was a song about love, [I argued] it would be teaching me how to get through a situation of love. I just wanted to write a catchy pop song, but I got a good essay out of it.”
By the time she hit fifteen, Isella’s taste had expanded and grown darker and more mature. Artists like Nine Inch Nails and Tom Waits became a conduit for the kind of raw intensity she’d always been drawn to, and gave her permission to push herself to new depths of expression. “That full rage and then the lyrics so filled with anger, I was really missing that,” she said. “Being able to just scream, ‘God is dead and no one cares,’ at the top of your lungs…oh my God, it was so relieving.”
That freedom that Reznor et al. endowed to the songwriter are evidenced on her latest EP; Isella’s vocals swing from coolly detached to emotional detonation, often in the span of the same song. She brings listeners into a world colored by feminist hyper-realism, challenging listeners to re-define ideas of femininity, and safety; to see that things are not okay.
Blending her love of pop with the raw edge of her industrial influences, Isella began channeling her fascination with darkness and feminine power into her songwriting. In 2020, she started building momentum and significant traction on TikTok, where her unflinching voice and haunting aesthetic found an eager audience. Since then, she has caught the attention of artists Melanie Martinez and Florence + The Machine, leading to opening slots on their tours. In 2024, she was asked to join Taylor Swift as an opener on the Eras tour.
The Los Angeles-based Isella has continued to release new music and refine her sound, finding a home between the abrasive textures of industrial music and the lushness and languor of Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey. Her latest single “Out In The Garden”, off her upcoming EP Something is a shell ., takes on the topic of religious piety as a means for excusing evil and misogyny. “There were women pushing the witch in the fire / And telling their husband to get out the stones / Go cuddle the man when you’re tired / Your husband’s arm is exhausted from breaking bone,” she snarls over a brooding, distorted piano.
Isella’s songs seethe with a controlled rage, and like Lady Lazarus, the women who inhabit them bear scars of growing up in a patriarchal culture. But there is vindication to be found. In the closing moments of “Out In The Garden”, Isella turns the mirror around: “Are you scared of seeing muscle come out of me like glue? /That something you think’s evil / Is exactly like you?” While she has ample pop facility as producer and songwriter, her artful rage connects her to a matrilineage of righteous women who came before – PJ Harvey, Courtney Love, and the halcyon days of 90’s grrrl-punk.
The young songwriter admits that her homeschooled life had a huge impact on her creative will. Her self possession could be read as defiant, if she wasn’t so unaffected “I don't have a huge desire to be understood,” Isella says. “I was very totally in my own bubble.I wasn't aware of myself being perceived,” she says of her freeform only-childhood spent in new and farflung places. She retreated to the world of her notebooks and imagination. “I had acres of boredom in my free time to be able to think of the music, the production. I wrote three songs a day. It was my whole world. And with nobody telling me that I didn't know who I was or I didn't know what I was doing. I was just being and doing whatever the fuck I wanted–just being outrageous.”
At 20, after years of woodshedding in her teenage bedroom and working out who and how she presents herself on stage amidst massive audiences that are not her own, and sold-out tours of her own – Isella is deeply in command of her own artistry off-stage as well. “A lot of recording and producing is just done by myself, spinning wheels in my bedroom. I have a co-producer, Ben Hudson, who I love. He'll find me sonics or beats that I love, and I'll take that home and just produce it out. Write the lyrics and melody, structure it, add layers.” She works methodically and with meticulous intention, she explains “I never do second passes. I just spend hours trying to figure out the right word in the initial moment. So, everything that has ever been released, it's always the first thought, but it's a matter of figuring out what I want to say — slowly.”
While Isella has grown into her ambitious musicianship over the course of her last few releases, lyrics remain the lynchpin for her; her screams, growls, seething whispers shape what it has meant for her, witnessing a world so hostile to women. As an artist, she says, it would not be authentic to who she is to do anything otherwise – she is not aiming for pleasant pop. She is alchemizing her truth, her rage, her perception of the world as a young woman. Her poetic, feminist foremothers showed her how to transmogrify those feelings into art. Today, she says that no matter how she continues to evolve as an artist, as a feminist, performer, and producer – Isella insists the cathartic potential of her words will always remain at the core of what she does. “It feels honest, and honesty is brutal. There's just no other way for me to say it, and saying it any other way would be very boring. What's the other option?”
Website: www.SOFIAISELLA.com
