From their first blind session together in a Los Angeles studio, Kozel and De Souza found their collaborative spark. The musician, known for her exhilarating, earnest indie sound, had been shopping around for producers to help her propel a long-held ambition to make all-out, ocean-deep emotive pop music. An album wasn’t even on the cards—“I just became enthralled with Elliott and what we were making,” she says. “Then, suddenly, most of Precipice was there.”
They’ve made 11 resplendent tracks that embrace De Souza’s open-hearted lyricism, through which she considers mental health, her own questionable decisions, and falling in and out of love—all with frenetic pop energy. After that, they kept recording, De Souza visiting LA from her home in a small mountain village in western North Carolina.
When De Souza was on tour last fall, Hurricane Helene destroyed her home and most of her possessions—save for a favorite guitar, laptop, and some childhood trinkets her roommates managed to save. She went back to LA to process that with Kozel and wrote a whole other record. “It was without any expectation or direction,” she says. “That’s more grunge, guitar-centered, with a bit of pop, and some very sad ballads.” It’s already been recorded—that, along with another, earlier project that she describes as leaning “experimental country.”
It must be strange, I posit to De Souza, for works and pieces of art made after experiencing such big emotions and hardships to come out in a twisted timeline. “It’s funny,” she says. “I’m at the whim of how the industry works.”
But with Precipice comes a clarity. “This was made with maybe my clearest sense of vision, and knowing my emotions in a new way,” she says. “It’s scary but sublime. I’m embracing the chaos. And though it might not be fully uncomplicated or clear all the time, I feel energized by this vision.”
Below, Indigo De Souza talks to Vogue about pop, finding her people (and a new home) in LA, and not fearing the precipice anymore.
Photo: Hannah Sommer