The grace and the gore of Sofia Isella

The raw ooze runs down her chin as the shell drops limply from her jaw. Again, she confronts the lens, eyebrow hairs brushed up like spiked nerves with a knowing gleam in her eyes. She is pleased with the mess she has made.

It is gore to be a woman, she believes, and so the 21-year-old digs her dirty fingernails under scabs to bring wounds to the surface. The horror she inflicts - whether it be her scabrous visuals and contortions of the body, or the way her voice sits so close to the ear, groaning like a rusty switchblade – is only a translation of the violence that has been done unto us. Though her music shares in the gothic, warped-pop atmospherics of Ethel Cain and the industrial blood-let of Nine Inch Nails, Sofia Isella feels just as closely allied to the disillusionment and feminine rage central to writers Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Plath and Mona Awad.

“We are wife, whore, mistress, maid, mother” – Isella declares on 2024’s vaudevillian piano ditty “The Doll People” – “Oh, the beauty and the buyer, take the screaming one because / A woman who doesn’t want it is much hotter than the one that does”. One of the song’s lingering, final images is looking under the doll’s skirts and finding maggots.

The ferocity of her pen has won Isella admirers in Taylor Swift, who invited her to open for her at London’s Wembley Stadium after resonating with her song “Everybody Supports Women”, and this month she will join Florence + The Machine on tour, whose new album Everybody Scream finds a kindred spirit in Isella’s music, exorcising all that women are taught to stifle.

The California-born artist understands that pop is a trojan horse; a three-minute smuggling of unsettling truths – and she has carved a place for herself within it despite standing in opposition to its ideals of escapism and artifice. Her stage presence is physical, provocative. Isella claws at her body as she sings with blood-shot, wide eyes; she writhes on the stage, a woman possessed. She walks into the audience, a messianic figure, and interlocks her fingers with a chosen girl as she sings as if they were the only people in the room. She shreds on the guitar, lollipop in her mouth, just as she shreds the violin which she was classically trained to play since the age of three. In a recent performance, she unbuttons her jeans to flash her all-America, star-spangled boxers. Her listeners, now in the millions, reward Isella’s visceral outpourings with sworn devotion.

Isella is angry. And she is also very, very funny. For her new EP, Something is a shell. humour and darkness are an act of alchemy. In “Above The Neck”, she surgically dissects the relationship between paedophilia and porn. Decimating assessments (“They’ve learned that the closer you look like to a kid / The more money you get from a forty-two-year-old piece of shit”) sit with lines of cutting retribution (“I’m not trying to seduce you, fuckface / I’ll be out in your lawn covered in snot”)

“Humour and darkness are two ways of clearly seeing the world,” Isella tells me, a curtain of tangled hair hanging over her eyes, her voice deadpan. “It’s spinning me off like a top in a new direction in my writing.” Their combined force, she finds, is a mainline to the truth.

Each of the EP’s six tracks explores the concept of a shell. “Numbers 31:17 – 18)” is the shell of God; “Out in the Garden” is the shell of a human; “Star V” is starving, the shelling out of your body; “The Chicken Is Naked and Afraid” is the shell of a man; “Above The Neck” is the shell of sex and how everything is hollowed to appear childlike – and “Evergreen Soldier”, finally, is the shell of a relationship.

“Everything is an accident… everything is an accident,” Isella says when I ask about why she was drawn to the shell as a motif, prone to long pauses for thought as if in silent dialogue with a spirit guide. She holds up a single, votive hand as she contemplates. “I don’t know why the world plays out the way it does. I don’t start projects with high intelligence. I watch it happen.”

Do these synchronicities happen often? “Constantly,” she says. “Which is why I have to be careful with what I say in my songs, very careful. I don’t believe in astrology or manifestation – they don’t piss me off as much as religion because there’s no child rape involved with the stars, right? But it is very strange. If I say something again and again in a song it will tend to find me in real life. When I’m writing, it’s like a flow state. When people ask me, ‘How did I write that?’ I don’t know, I really don’t know. 

"If I look back in time and try to remember how my brain connected the dots to write it, I could not tell you. I’m not fucking with you. I genuinely couldn’t tell you, and I couldn’t tell myself. I would like to tell myself. I would like to inform myself, but I am very much not helpful in the act of informing myself.”

I ask if Isella has faith that whatever intervenes in her writing will always show up for her. “What a lovely question,” she says, with relish. “Oh, that’s a great, lovely question. Do I have faith? If there is a subject I already know I want to write about badly, it will be written. I just have to make sure it is done excellently. I also never rewrite. Once I’ve written it, there will be no edits or changes. I’ll make sure I get it right the first time,” clicking her tongue and making the gesture of batting for a clean, home run. 

“But I can’t stand rewriting. Oh, I can’t stand it. I can’t take it anymore.” She recalls a song she wrote when she was 12, the life squeezed out of it through rewrites. “I think it was a helpful experience. I think we have to look at it with light and joy in our eyes and let us not be so negative. I hate the word potential, can’t fucking stand it. Just hit it on the first try. There’s no such thing as potential. It's right here, right now, or not at all.”

For much of her childhood, Isella was homeschooled around the world. Her father is the Chilean-American cinematographer Claudio Miranda, and her mother is a memoirist. As early as eight-years-old, she started writing lyrics – one of the first being about Henry VIII and his six wives whose fate rested with his favour or wrath. 

This sense of detachment and rootlessness allowed Isella to become a keen observer, in an orbit of her own. Her intact sense of imagination is something she attributes to boredom. When she eventually enrolled at UCLA at eighteen, she says, “I felt like I was in the body of something blending in perfectly. I always felt very weird, like I was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Around May 2025, Sofia Isella was accused of being demonic for the very first time. I offer my congratulations. “Thank you,” she says. “I was waiting for it. But it came as a total surprise. I mean, I didn’t see that one coming. Really creeped up on me out of the corner of my eye.” 

Her reaction to it was at first light-hearted, the measure of her work doing what it was intended to: “But I discussed it with somebody who had an angrier perspective, and I realised religious people love to demonise anything that makes them uncomfortable.”

“Out in the Garden”, with its thunderous drums which ring out like a death knell, reckons with the anaesthesia of religious indoctrination. A person in her life, “Hannah”, believed that you need to pray before and after you listen to music and wash your hands. Isella sings: “Are you scared to push that knife inside? / Afraid of seeing blood where you thought it was dead and dry? / Are you scared of seeing muscle come out of me like glue? / That something you think is evil / Is exactly like you?” It is from this song that the name of her forthcoming tour, Her Desire, The Nemesis is drawn. 

“It’s easier to hurt people if you don’t see them as human,” she notes. Her lyrics insist on her humanity and the humanity of those who religion rejects. “Religion was not something I used to hate. I used to have a gentler approach with it, ‘to each their own’, yada yada. But I’ve come to realise that I just don’t think ‘to each their own’ holds any weight in this world. When we are asked to respect old texts when they say we can take kids and do whatever we want to them, I just don’t think that’s worthy of it. I think it’s very dangerous to say something deserves respect just because it’s old.”

“Sometimes, people call themselves religious because it gives them a protection blanket. Trump says he’s a Christian, and that man is further from the classic Christian than I could possibly imagine. I think he’s saying that because it gives him this gentle approach and connects him to his fan base. 

"People become Christians, from my experience of talking to a lot of them, for two reasons: the first is they grow up with it and God is like Santa Claus who never went away, or something really traumatic happened to them at some point in their life and they needed some kind of father figure, somebody imagining that somebody is always looking after them and they will be rewarded. Emotionally, I can understand that, but where I get really defensive and protective is when, in order to keep that comfort blanket, you have to defend atrocities.”

On her 20th birthday, a disagreement with a couple of her Christian friends about the nature of a hideous Bible verse left her in tears. It was an Old Testament passage in which Moses orders the murder of all women and girls – except for the virgins, whom he tells the men they can “keep alive for yourselves”. Though these friends had never heard the passage before, they justified it for the “context” she was supposedly missing – a common excuse to justify the worst of its teachings. She begins the song “Numbers 31:17 – 18)” reading the verse in a broken whisper, and as the quiet ballad unravels she becomes louder, emboldened: “Context! Context! / There is context to the gore / Relaxed your furrowed brow / For rape was blessed by the lord.” 

The track has become a source of comfort for those who have been raped or sexually assaulted, particularly those silenced by religious doctrine. Isella flays the flesh being peeled away from the lies, until all that is left are the bare bones to be confronted.

Her writing takes great pleasure in dismantling the notion of “good-girlhood”. She describes a story from Carré Otis, a supermodel who was among the first to vocalise the trauma and abuse she suffered in the industry. A man asks the models to describe their underwear, and when it is Carré’s turn, she says, “I’m in granny pants with a skid mark”. Isella says, “Those are the stories that bring me so much joy… It feels like there’s this inside joke that we all have and that we’re all sharing, but we’re not saying out loud so the men don’t catch on.”

The song which is the EP’s quiet outlier – and defies anything Isella has written before – is its final track, “Evergreen Soldier”. She knew it had to be the closing track. “It’s so innocent and delicate, in a cracked-open type of way,” she explains. “The shell is completely open. It’s the most personal song. It was written in a state of mind that I never write in, which is the heat of the moment. I never write in that state. I don’t think I would’ve written this song if I wasn’t on tour. It brought up all these emotions and past desires, and I found myself in a location which my past self wanted to be in more than anything. 

"Being there just made me ache for her and what she wanted, and finally she was exactly where she wanted to be after she begged for years. And there was nothing I could do about it. It was too late. My past was shut, it was hollowed out. It felt so unfair to me.”

The parting line is, “Goodbye, evergreen soldier, Dew / All the strangers are singing about you”. Already, she is imagining how she will sing it on tour for the first time. “I’m very curious how I will process it when people sing it back to me. I’m fascinated by how that’s going to turn out, because I was too choked up to do it during soundcheck when there was nobody in the room. Hopefully I pull my shit together. But that song has pure heart and vulnerability. The other songs are slightly more controllable, because they are something I feel at all times. I’m constantly enraged about paedophilia. I could write a song about it right now. But ‘Evergreen Soldier’ was a feeling that was so extreme. It started as nothing and spiked in the air.”

It’s not enough to live with anger, Isella believes, the trick is to use it. “I think the best compliment people have given me at my shows is that I’ve changed their mind on something, or I’ve converted them from their religion or changed their family’s minds of their beliefs. That, to me, feels like there is some purpose for it,” she shares. “It gives me hope that there is some sense of change possible for women who live in anger, that there is the possibility of joy.”