Indigo De Souza – ‘All of This Will End’
Over the last half-decade, American singer-songwriter Indigo De Souza has been making her case as one of the most fascinating upstart artists in the indie world. Now it’s the point in time where you can either get on the bus or get left behind. De Souza is staring down her third studio album, so there’s no more “upstart” in her world. She’s established and comfortable in ways that she’s never been before.
2018’s I Love My Mom and 2021’s Any Shape You Take both laid out De Souza’s singular identity brilliantly. De Souza’s speciality is a potent mix of psychedelic imagery, guitar rock, familial tradition, heightened anxiety, catharsis, and apocalyptic idealism. If you’re looking for your rock music to be enthralling and absorbing but also aren’t afraid of the occasional bad trip, then De Souza is the artist for you. With her latest release, All of This Will End, De Souza keeps these elements close to her chest while exploring electronica, balladry, and symphonic rock.
If I had one complaint about Any Shape You Take, it’s that the album’s exploratory nature occasionally wandered off into listlessness. The same can’t be said for All of This Will End, which only has two tracks that exceed the four-minute mark. Most of the album is in and out before you can even get your footing, but it’s not slight or itching to get things over with. De Souza simply lays out each song, says her piece, and moves on before anyone has the chance to get bored. That’s genius songwriting technique right there.
If you’re not as cool with the woozy modern electronic-rock style, you probably won’t get on board with the album opener ‘Time Back’. Every part of the track is smoothed over with machinery, whether it’s the mechanical layering of De Souza’s vocals or the insistent buzz of the keyboards and disco beats. At the centre, De Souza pulls out aquatic metaphors and desert imagery to protect herself from the emotional blows of losing someone close to her. De Souza’s willingness to let high-pitched screams take over her tracks, also seen in ‘Real Pain’, is a one-way ticket to alienating casual listeners. But putting ‘Time Back’ at the front of All of This Will End is deliberate: get with the program or get to stepping.
‘You Can Be Mean’ takes things back to intoxicating guitar-focused rock, with De Souza leaning into the indie coronation that she’s been purposefully avoiding. Blunt lyrics, catchy melodies, and high-energy blasts against some asshole with daddy issues all make ‘You Can Be Mean’ a firecracker of a track. Just like most songs on the album, ‘You Can Be Mean’ comes to a sudden stop just as it picks up some serious steam.
‘Losing’ and ‘Wasting Your Time’ follow the same pattern, with both tracks barely crossing the two-minute mark. De Souza’s songs can be real bummers if you sit with them for a long time: “I keep feeling like an idiot / When I reach out to touch and there’s nobody there” from the former and “I’m devout to darkness you can’t see / But it’s always pulling me” from the latter make All of This Will End emo as hell from the second it starts to the moment it ends. But hey, life ain’t all sunshine and rainbows, you know.
If you aren’t pouring over the lyrics with feverish devotion, All of This Will End will sound like a welcome return to De Souza’s more stripped-back and raw sound. But that’s just a ploy: ‘Parking Lot’ and ‘All of This Will End’ are the last true blue guitar rock tracks before De Souza decides to lean back into the electronic buzz for a bit. Both tracks benefit from the tightness of De Souza blasting out rock tracks with a live band, but she’s not afraid to completely forsake that sound on the churning disco-dance track ‘Smog’ and the drum machine-heavy ‘The Water’.
With every new song, All of This Will End gets gradually more intense and introspective. ‘Always’ slows things down (before ramping them up to radical degrees) to meditate on the loss of family and broken promises. It’s hard to tell whether De Souza’s probing real-life tragedy or not, but the end result isn’t reliant on the track being autobiographical. Every time ‘Always’ shifts dynamics, it has the power to knock you over.
For the final tracks, De Souza leaps full-on into psychedelic transcendence. ‘Not My Body’ could be an ego death or a defiant kickback at the male gaze, but De Souza’s desire to pick up the desert rock and country music fragments that have been floating throughout her music over the years starts to become more clear in the final act of All of This Will End. When the album’s final track, ‘Younger & Dumber’, comes in, De Souza provides a soft landing after an eclectic album of sounds. De Souza doesn’t exactly yearn for a simpler time as much as she interrogates it for meaning. It’s some of the most insightful writing that she’s ever done, with ‘Younger & Dumber’ leaving the door wide open for whatever De Souza decides to take on next: country, indie rock, and electronica all look promising. “Which way will I run?” she sings, and we can’t help but wonder the same thing.
Far from transcendent, All of This Will End probably won’t sound all that different to De Souza’s other albums to casual listeners. But for those who have poured over her work, the songwriter’s third studio LP will be nothing short of a revelation. Completely at ease with her own musical identity, De Souza pushes at the boundaries of her own music to see how it all fits together. The final picture is as diverse as it is fascinating, and there are plenty of ways to get lost in All of This Will End, another great album from one of music’s most underrated artists.
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