Captivating a growing audience in the past year, Sofia Isella’s depictions of life’s dichotomies — particularly for women — uniquely combine raw, articulate poetry with unsettling imagery and a dynamic stage presence.

Originally from California, 20-year-old Isella began releasing music in 2020, her style spanning alternative pop, indie, poetry and rock. She gained popularity online in 2023 by posting short-form videos of her breakout song “Hot Gum” — which currently has over 16 million streams on Spotify. The following year, Isella’s music extended well beyond her online fanbase when she opened for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour at Wembley Stadium in London in 2024. Only a month later, she released her EP, “I Can Be Your Mother,” and headlined a five-show tour through California.

A vital factor in the provocative and disconcerting psychological and emotional impact of Isella’s songwriting is her ingenious wordplay, which masterfully strips complex stories of the hypocrisies in the world into its most raw and brutal form. Exemplifying how she settles her songs amidst the discomfort of confrontation with reality, her song “All of Human Knowledge Made Us Dumb” explores individuals’ fleeting attention to real world connections after prolonged exposure to the vastness and ever-racing pace of technology.

Following her performance of this song in London, Isella told NME, “I’m walking around in a sea of phones while singing about technology.” After experiencing this hypocrisy live, she now leans into it further by curating a forced perspective for her viewers.

In recent shows, Isella has asked the crowd to hold up their phone flashlights while she walks through, making direct physical contact with audience members. Commenters, who only watched videos of this experience online, criticized the audience for experiencing their connection with her through their phone as she sang a warning against technology’s grasp on society. Others, however, noticed the intended irony she fostered to situate her viewers within the discomfort of their reality.

Underscoring her unsettling lyrics and messaging, Isella’s graphic aesthetic develops her themes behind her thought-provoking messaging. She played around with the visual of pregnancy for her 2024 EP, “I Can Be Your Mother,” depicting Isella with a baby bump on her back as though carrying the weight of a career. With the pregnancy on her back, the imagery feels inherently discomforting while calling out the burden of society’s demands of women that she addresses throughout the album.

To make these songs, Isella said she draws creative inspiration from poets like Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, ’90s alternative rock and her classical violin training. She described how she begins with poetry, later adding musical backing, or she starts with the production and adds phrases from past free writes to create the lyrics. Being a producer herself, her beats are forceful and diverse even within a single song.

In combination with the underlying beats, Isella incorporates piano, guitar and violin into her songs, using four separate instruments in her recent live shows — the latter of which sometimes functioning as a piercing siren between sections of a song.

In her live performances, Isella builds on the unsettling nature of her songs by adding heavy gasps, choking sounds and screams between lyrics. In the same vein, Isella’s quick-paced, frantic movements while performing live mirror the desperation in her lyrics. She traverses the entirety of the stage and climbs surrounding fixtures, striking dynamic imagery — even leaning over the barriers into the crowd and making contact with the faces of audience members. With the combination of these elements, Isella’s fervent stage presence befits her unnerving aesthetic and remains unmatched.

Touring since 2021, Isella started out performing in Australia, winning Musician of the Year at the 2022 Gold Coast Music Awards. In the following two years, Isella opened for Melanie Martinez, Tom Odell and Swift before starting her first world tour, You’ll Understand, Dick., in April 2025.

Isella is set to release her next EP, “I’m Camera,” on May 23. With Isella’s new EP coming soon and her popularity rising, her creative journey into the unsettling hypocrisy of the modern world is only just getting started.