Twenty-one-year-old singer, songwriter, and producer Sofia Isella is recalling a dream she had once. Her fingers, which are wrapped in rubber bands that look like twisted rings, tap on the table at the Morgan Library café in New York City and gesture to her face, then her brain.
In the dream, you could buy a sort of magical hammer.
“And every time you tapped yourself with a hammer, you would look more and more like Megan Fox,” Isella says. “Eventually, everyone looked exactly like Megan Fox, so they're just tapping themselves to death. I feel like we're all attempting to look like the same thing.”
Isella’s artistry and public performance seem girded with a mission to do the exact opposite. “I want to have no awareness of what I look like in a way, and I want to be full of passion and vigor, and ugly,” Isella says of how she looks onstage. “I ask it of my crowd. I ask them to be as ugly as possible, because I think when you have that as your requirement, it relaxes you to not constantly have to be as pretty as possible or control your facial features. It makes you want to have freedom. Freedom is beautiful.”
Isella’s music and the artwork for it, most recently on her new EP Something is a shell., are comprised of muscle, teeth, and blood, all drawing attention to religious hypocrisy, cultural pedophilia, and historic and infrastructural misogyny under a gothic, alternative-pop sheen.
Physically, Isella’s fingernails are clipped short, free of polish and intentionally dirty. She’s also wearing a sort of finger splint that she says is for the “grandeur,” not an injury, though she smirks as she says this in a way that suggests she could be kidding. Her thumbnails stand out, grown long, and sharpened to a point. Her dark hair falls in stringy pieces in front of her brown eyes, framed by small, silver, antique-looking glasses an old clock-maker in a fairytale might wear. Isella’s eyebrows are moussed into jagged peaks. Smudges of charcoal mimic dirt at the corner of her mouth, the curve of her nose.
The dirt was real once, when she came up out of a muddy festival show where she had face-planted and realized that was how she wanted to feel onstage. She began rubbing actual soil on her face, except “people told me that I'm going to die from it because of [chemical] fertilizer,” she laments. Now, she supplements with charcoal and cacao powder; she wants to smell like truffle and gravel, dirt and earth.
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Isella was born in Los Angeles, the older daughter of memoirist Kelli Bean and Oscar-winning cinematographer Claudio Miranda. She was homeschooled throughout her childhood, and the family, including her younger sister, moved often, to Taiwan, Canada, and Australia for a few years. That nomadic upbringing—not dissimilar to the musician life she lives now—suited Isella well. “We've always said we're like a traveling band,” Isella explains. “I have the most loving, supportive parents. It really makes me emotional to think about because I know so many artists who don't have that, and it makes such a difference to have support.”
Isella was often bored, but she says that ended up being “the greatest gift.” It left her plenty of time for other pursuits. At age two, she began playing the violin, later practicing three to five hours a day. “I was a very intense kid,” she recalls, who practiced even if she was sick and hunched over the toilet. “I couldn’t miss a day. My brain likes a streak.”
Isella also began writing all the time. She plucked songs on a ukulele that were inspired by words her mom would throw out as inspiration (“Railroad!”). By age eight, she was sometimes cranking out three to five songs a day.
By age 10, she was experimenting with her personal style, donning tutus and fuzzy boots and earrings the size of her head. She experienced just enough bullying to be enthralled by it—it was just the way it happened in books! “I was an attention wh*re from day one,” she says. “I wanted people to constantly have a reaction to me, and it didn't have to be good always.”
The Sofia Isella who commands a stage now—who plays the electric violin during her sets, who cuts into patriarchy and purity culture with her lyrics, who tugs down her pants to mock the men who are so easily manipulated by sex and youth in her song “Above the Neck”—is the natural result of all these things. She is self-assured and open, confident in her ability to argue a point, but also curious about her own blind spots. She is secure, protected and inspired by her close-knit family.
Isella, tall, cool, and the mirror of her mom (who drops her daughter off for our interview in matching oversized button-downs), moves through the world clear-eyed about what people can do to each other, but also with the paradoxical innocence of someone who has been deeply cared for and the perspective of someone who has seen a lot of the world. She is principled and sturdy in the face of everything that might pull her off the ground.
That applies to her growing celebrity (nearly 3 million Instagram followers, yet she says she never gets followed on the street) after four EPs, and the beauty standards and gender roles she critiques on songs like “The Doll People” and “Star V.” She does not have a label and doesn’t totally understand what they do. And she always assumes festival crowds are there to see the band after her—blame the years playing for “malls and tumbleweeds”—even though she’s built a healthy fan base with the success of her 2023 song “Everybody Supports Women,” which led to her opening for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour (she's currently opening for Florence + the Machine on her Everybody Scream tour).
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But Isella doesn’t feel like the numbers (charts, followers, streams) are worth paying much attention to: “You can't hold on. It doesn't feel like a thing to grip.” Live shows still feel like a Severance-esque act of splitting herself; she is either in her normal life, surrounded by family and music at home in LA, or on tour doing “Hannah Montana sh*t” in an “alternate dimension.”
Live performance is one of the most compelling parts of Isella’s artistic vision. It brings the inherent tension in her art—how Isella exists as an admitted lover of “attention,” someone not immune to the chemical addiction of virality, and someone with sharp moral clarity about the horrors of being a woman and who inflicts those horrors—to a head.
In the song “Orchestrated, Wet, Verboten,” which she describes as a love letter to the people at her shows, she sings, “I want your feelings confused if it's obsession or repulsion.” Onstage, performing “Above the Neck,” she maintains intense eye contact, cocks a finger gun and aims it at the audience, pivots it into two fingers beckoning fans forward. Now, as she works on her next project after Something is a shell., she’s found that the live show informs the writing—they are woven together.
In her new music video, “The Chicken Is Naked and Afraid,” Isella crunches on raw eggs still in the shell, eats a bell pepper like an apple, bites into a banana still in its peel. She hits herself in the head with a hammer. Her mouth is bloody, and she eats, she eats, she eats.
Her comment sections are filled with versions of “I love an artist who isn’t afraid to be ugly.” There is a trap of desirability that Isella is always in conversation with as a pop star (of sorts); a woman; a young woman who knows she gets away with things because she’s hot and so smudges charcoal on her face to look dirty. The way she writes about the trap, performs its horrors, could make you believe she’s conquered something fundamental. Ultra-enlightened. Above it all. But of course it is, like all things, more complicated than that.
“I'm still the 21-year-old woman with the same… I will have a desire to use my face as a weapon of mass destruction and get what I want,” she admits. “I don't know if I like that about myself.” She mentions a desire to take a pill that would remove her horniness for a time, and her desire for physical beauty, which she finds “achingly” boring. What I hear is a desire to remove the trap, once and for all. To turn the hammer on a different target.
Isella is still chewing on all of this, she says, miming big, exaggerated bites, teeth flashing.
“Everybody is trying to become weak and shriveled,” she says, mentioning an influencer talking about what she’s going to eat next and how to get skinnier. “I just think that it's so painfully boring. We're all going to look the same, and then we're all going to praise Jesus, and we're going to scream, ‘Hallelujah!’ We're all tapping ourselves with Megan Fox hammers at the speed of our lungs. What is the endgame? What is the want?”
She wants to be able to carry a man on her back, the way she does in the “Chicken” music video. It was a heady, powerful feeling when she could do it, despite people on set telling her she couldn’t. “I'm just carrying this giant, strong muscle man who's supposed to be so powerful in our society, and I have enough strength in me—like eating enough, working out—to be able to chuck a man over my shoulder,” Isella says.
Throughout our conversation Isella has a way of distilling a big idea to its essential parts, such as the line of power, destruction, and rage that stretches from before the Bible all the way to the darkness (and dark humor) she captures in her music today. “I just think it's a very weird coincidence,” she says wryly, “that the beauty standard is to be able to not fight anything off, or run away.”
