by Chad Rafferty (@chadrafferty)
In general, Indigo De Souza doesn’t mince words. The appeal of her music, along with a pop star’s knack for melody and a grungy edge, has always been a rare earnestness, a seemingly innate tendency to bare her soul through raw poetry exploring the everydayness of being young and alive. Now, on her exceptional third LP, All of This Will End, De Souza is still rooted to the present moment while embracing a break from self-described chaos, enjoying a shared state of centeredness and a desire to move through. “I was finally able to trust myself fully,” she claims in regards to the album’s conception, which is just the latest in a string of fantastic recordings to come out of Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios (MJ Lenderman, Wednesday).
The album’s title, which De Souza considers a personal motto, is a modern day memento mori, but her particular brand of Stoicism seems to have more to do with love than responsibility. Rather than serving as a motivator, death is there to take the heat off, paring away any binary notion of expectation and allowing for things to exist exactly as they are — good, bad, or otherwise. Instead of finding despair in the abject meaninglessness of things, she affirms power in the meaning in everything, past and present included, combing through the things that happened to you and those that you happened to, allowing them to inform the future without strangling it.
For the first half of the album, De Souza dives into these themes with a series of quick-hitters, showing off genre-defying range and an impressive ability to express a full idea in under two and a half minutes. On opening track “Time Back,” you can hear an elevated confidence that De Souza assigns to the community she’s found, an army of support at her back allowing her to lead with her talent, thoughtfulness and sense of humor. On the fuzzy rocker “Mean to Me,” she skewers the Maybe Traumatized But Shitty Regardless Ex-Boyfriend with empathetically self-actualized grace: “I’d like to think you got a good heart / and your dad was just an asshole growing up / but i don’t see you trying that hard / to be better than he is”. She then masterfully moves into the soft and deeply introspective “Losing” before crashing through the mic on “Wasting Your Time,” flanked by what she’s affectionately dubbed the “freaky alien guitar voicings” of guitarist Dexter Webb.
Much of the record follows this pattern — dissonant internal systems arguing with each other, each part trying to make sense of the madness and ephemera in its own way, sometimes all at once on the same song. Like in standout track “All of This Will End,” placed flush in the album’s middle where it serves as the crux, mission statement and mantra: “there’s only love / there’s only moving through / and trying your best / sometimes it’s not enough / who gives a fuck? / all of this will end”.
On the back half, the songs get progressively longer as De Souza slows down, engaging different parts and continuing to reflect, moving steadily deeper and crafting simple but dreamlike images, from mowing the lawn under a smoggy haze to floating down a stream into a parking lot from the past. The songs feel more abstract, but while the first half was focused on unpacking, side two outlines a thesis — what she loves, what she wants, and where she’s headed, culminating in the devastating closing run of “Not My Body” and “Younger & Dumber”. On the former, De Souza examines the distinction between the body and the self, while the final track gives a nod to all of the different selves that it took for the present one to emerge, just as it is.
At one point on All of This Will End, De Souza claims that she wants nothing to do with magic. Yet something like it is exactly what she’s achieved with a 33-minute spell that transports listeners to a space belonging entirely to her, universal in its specificity and mystical in its excavations of mundanity. It’s both an unapologetically optimistic record and a deeply sad one, expressing a relentless hope that exists because of that sadness rather than in spite of it, and it’s hard to call the end result anything short of magical.