The Sad Girl packs things up and sets its sights on new shores: optimistic indie rock about doubts about the shitty world.
Indigo De Souza lets her old self and the stations of her youth pass by in the rearview mirror on a coming-of-age trip right into the middle of self-knowledge: on her third album ALL OF THIS WILL END, the artist from North Carolina dissects everything with harsh, cutting lines the romances that never materialized, the friendships that endured instead, the doubts about this shitty world and your place in it. “When I come home / I will begin again”, sings on the first track “Time Back” – and not only symbolically returns to her mother’s house.
Because although Indigo De Souza was proclaimed the torchbearer of new indie rock after her second album ANY SHAPE YOU TAKE, released in 2021, privately her confidence fell to freezing point. She changed her life, separated from her circle of acquaintances and locked herself in her old children’s room, where she compared her emotional cosmos with the microcosm of the US American suburbia outside her window.
Somewhere between the movie alien from “Under The Skin” and Björk’s “Human Behaviour”
In this way, the neighbors’ mowed lawn is transformed into “Smog” as the epitome of small-town monotony, a parking lot as a personal oasis of meditation or a supermarket as a beeping capitalism monster. Indigo encounters all of these scenes with an insecurity and childish naivety, as if she had just tumbled into this world – somewhere between the film alien from “Under The Skin” and Björk’s “Human Behaviour”.
And while Indigo, under the influence of psychedelics, settles accounts with absent father and toxic relationships in that same parking lot or her beloved kayak, razor-sharp one-liners emerge, as in “You Can Be Mean” – “I’d like to think you got a good heart and your dad was just an asshole growing up” – on which her voice first crouches and then whistles happily from the outro.
An optimism that stubbornly defies black painting pierces through every guitar board
Because what luckily didn’t have to go through with the emotional clearing out is her cherished psych indie sound, which in its sad-girl nostalgia is reminiscent of Snail Mail in parts, with the professional world-weariness of a Lana Del Rey melting into the realism of a Bruce Springsteen – or on which Indigo, like the early Girlpool, can spit unimpressed into the mic. An optimism that stubbornly defies black painting and shines through every guitar board and competes with the burgeoning spring in Technicolor.
The rather sketchy songs of the first half, which sometimes end abruptly as if in the middle of a train of thought, gain in length and self-confidence in the second half of the album, reflecting the painful shedding of skin called growing up. On “Always,” Indigo appears to be literally tearing her body apart with a cathartic roar, which she then emerges on “Not My Body” through a radiant headvoice to merge with the treble-twirling pedal steel. The verdict of your trip? “I don’t feel at home in this town.” But before she packs things up and sets her sights on new shores, Indigo leaves behind a phenomenal ode to love – that mystical power that ultimately creates the best beginnings.
Author: Sonja Matuszczyk