Indigo De Souza is in the thrall of a glamorous crustacean named Shrimp Shrimply. Her mouth is agape and her eyes are wide as she watches the nimble dancer in front of her, gussied up in a sequined prawn head and flowing tendrils, start to strip to the Billie Eilish ballad “Ocean Eyes.” As the crowd gathered at Coney Island’s Gills! Gills! Gills! Fishtacular burlesque show erupts into applause, De Souza turns to me and whispers, “That almost made me cry.”
During intermission, we make a beeline outside to debrief about the night’s performers, which also included host Tallulah Talons, who modeled a fabulous slime green bodysuit complete with immaculate foam gills, a drunken hula hooper in a tiny grass-skirt thong, and a naughty clown who humped my head. In comparison, the 24-year-old De Souza is dressed relatively modestly in an oversized Biggie tee, bright green shorts, and white platform boots, her eyes lined with little gems. When she puts her mask back on, I notice that her knuckle tattoos spell out “home.”
While De Souza is not necessarily a regular patron of underwater-themed burlesque shows, she is very familiar with environments that allow people to revel in their unencumbered selves. In early 2020, around the same time that she recorded her upcoming sophomore record Any Shape You Take, De Souza left her adopted hometown of Asheville, North Carolina and moved to a nearby church in the woods. This hallowed space is where the singer and her pals dress up, move their bodies, and hold space for each other, a ritual that is captured in her magical recent video for “Hold U.”
Like many of the tracks on Any Shape You Take, “Hold U” envisions a love—romantic, familial, or communal—that can sustain through even the darkest periods of pain. After a year defined by isolation and loss, De Souza and her friends wanted to capture a celebration of queer joy, and the scenes of an exuberant dance party more than succeed in inducing secondhand catharsis. But the video shoot was also a personal milestone for De Souza, a reminder of the person she’s become and the values she now cherishes. “When I became friends with people who celebrate joy, I realized that I was surrounded by a lot of darkness before,” she says. “But it’s OK to dance and laugh. Even though it’s all fleeting, it’s still important.”
De Souza was raised in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, a small conservative town near the Blue Ridge Mountains, population just about 2,000. She was primarily brought up by her mother, a visual artist whose psychedelic paintings now adorn De Souza’s album covers; in the one for Any Shape You Take, naked, skull-faced avatars of the mother-daughter pair fill the aisle of a supermarket overrun with greenery. De Souza’s father, who was a less frequent presence in her childhood, is a Brazilian bossa nova guitarist.
A shy and lonely kid, she was one of the only mixed-race students at school. In an attempt to fit in, De Souza recalls, “I would ask my mom to straighten my hair and buy me Hollister clothing and Lunchables.” But her mother, a proud eccentric who picked De Souza up from school in a truck covered in naked Barbie dolls and fake bombs with the names of countries America has brutalized painted on them, had no interest in raising a cookie-cutter kid. Knowing that her daughter loved to sing and had a growing interest in playing the guitar, De Souza’s mother enrolled her in music lessons and bought her a 4-track cassette recorder. De Souza began writing songs—about her mom, the terrors of global warming, and the disappearance of her confidence—and soon she was performing them for strangers at coffee shops and on the street. By the age of 11, De Souza explains, “I knew spiritually that music was what I was going to do with my life.” But she was also stifled by her tiny hometown. “I felt like the world wasn’t meant for me, like nobody really saw me.”
During high school, De Souza moved about an hour away from Spruce Pine to the relatively diverse and artsy hub of Asheville with her older sister, leading to what she describes as the “ultimate glow up.” She finally found her people.
The years immediately after high school are a bit blurry, and De Souza now describes it as a time of “flailing through the universe.” There was a relationship with someone older, a friend group that romanticized depression, a lot of tattoos, and plenty of psychedelics. In 2018, she released her debut album, I Love My Mom. Recorded at a friend’s home, the record is a maelstrom of misfits, perceived flaws, unsatisfied relationships, and Southern ennui set against tenderhearted indie rock. Even amid this bleary period of her life, De Souza’s songwriting became increasingly clear-headed. “I went through a series of existential crises, which led me to start using death, my mother, and mortality as symbolism in my writing,” she explains. “I started to write in a way that was more abstract and more true to me.”
After I Love My Mom, labels started reaching out, and De Souza eventually chose indie fixture Saddle Creek, in part due to what she describes as their artist-first attitude, progressive ideas about the industry, and understanding of mental illness. Around the same time, after making the difficult decision to step away from a long-term relationship that she describes as “dysfunctional and codependent,” De Souza focused on getting to know herself once more. “It was almost like I had been buried and lost in my own body and I didn’t have any identity,” she says. “When I broke out of that, I found an incredible amount of self-love.”
These lessons—the radiance of self-compassion, an openness to change, and communication—sit at the heart of Any Shape You Take. “If you want to change/I’ll be here to love you/No matter what shape you might take,” she sings on the penultimate track, “Way Out.” A sense of fluidity is also reflected in the album’s sound, which pushes beyond the steady grunge of I Love My Mom towards neo-soul, pop, and plenty of good old fashioned guitar jams.
De Souza embraces a full spectrum of emotions across Any Shape You Take, from joy to anger to sorrow. Album centerpiece “Real Pain” has her encouraging self-compassion during grief before the song dissolves into a barrage of anguished screams sampled from De Souza’s fans and loved ones; opener “17” is an uplifting, Auto-Tuned dose of pop bliss about the devastating end of a relationship. All of these moods come together in “Kill Me,” a lilting, snarling track about a romance that’s too all-consuming for its own good. “No one asked me to feel this fucked up, but here I am—fucked up,” she bluntly declares, and yeah, it really is like that sometimes.
The song’s video brings this combination of joy and destruction to life in a wrestling-themed video that concludes with De Souza in a strobe-lit ring, dancing around an elaborately decorated three-tiered cake before she smooshes it with her butt—a fetish performance appropriately dubbed cake-sitting. “I wasn’t sure what it was going to feel like but once I sat on that cake, I loved it,” she says with a giggle. “Sitting my ass in this perfect, sweet thing that people are supposed to daintily cut into really fulfilled a nihilistic part of my brain. That dance was one of the greatest releases of my whole life.”
Indigo De Souza: I’ve always wanted to share exactly what I’m feeling all the time, I guess it’s just the way I was born into the world. I sometimes have to be like, “OK, stop telling everyone how you’re feeling.” I find freedom in people knowing what I’m feeling, so there’s no mystery. From a young age, I found that if I really put it all out there in my songwriting, people will find something to relate to. That became a really special ability, because I noticed how it brought people together in this bubble of feeling.
I initially asked for people’s voices when I was recording demos before the pandemic, because I wanted to embody collective pain. Then I asked again during the pandemic, and it took on a new meaning. I wanted to give people the opportunity to express whatever they were feeling at that time. I received a lot of very dark recordings that were very heavy to listen to, but also some lighter ones from people that were just excited to send something. Some in New York City sent me a little passage about how they felt like they couldn’t scream in their apartment and needed to find some place at a park. Nobody else that was recording with me knew the individual screams like I did. That section of the song is a representation of the idea that, no matter how separate our brains are, we all experience pain in such immense ways throughout our lives, and how that connects us.
There is such a difference between opening for people and headlining. When you’re opening, people may not know who you are. But when you are headlining, everyone’s like, “Hello. I paid $15 to be here. Did I get my money’s worth?” It’s wild to me when so many people show up in one spot, like, you all have things going on and you’re choosing to be here tonight. It’s a lot of pressure.
But the only thing I get afraid of when I’m headlining is forgetting the words, because I dissociate from my body pretty regularly. When people start to sing along with me—which I don’t want anyone to feel bad about, because it’s really sweet when they do that—I start to get hung up on what they are singing. There was one moment at a show that I played with my other band, Icky Bricketts, where I completely left my body and stopped singing in the middle of a song. I sat down on the ground and managed to recenter after a few minutes, and then we started the song over.
Mark [Capon], who co-owns the store Harvest Records in Asheville, introduced me to the idea of having a music lawyer who could help me understand the things that I was being offered by labels. If I hadn’t had that, I would have gone with the first thing I was offered because I thought it was cool. I’ve had artist friends who were taken advantage of, who didn’t know what certain words or ideas within contracts mean. When music is your whole life, it becomes very emotionally involved. Sometimes it seems like the music industry doesn’t think about the people who are making the art that then makes money for everyone involved. If that person isn’t supported emotionally, they won’t be able to produce. I would like to see the music industry become more human.
