The year was 2018, and bedroom-pop reigned supreme. This was the year that Indigo De Souza released her debut album, ‘I Love My Mom’, with an endearingly DIY sound that united thousands of listeners as they were gifted the sonic equivalent of a late-night heart-to-heart at a sleepover.

Seven years on, ‘Precipice’, De Souza’s latest album, has arrived, with all the vulnerability and charm of her freshman confessional, but with a newfound maturity as she leans into a more anthemic sound. 

‘Be My Love’ is a stunningly ethereal opener, with De Souza’s upper-register vocals gliding over an ascending piano line. As she repeatedly sings “It’s not the end” in her unwaveringly angelic tone, we are sucked into her soundscape as she essentially performs a sonic hypnosis to pull us into the rest of her record. 

‘Precipice's sophomore single, ‘Crying Over Nothing’, stands out as the pinnacle of the album. While the title and lyrics, intimate and universal in nature, are reminiscent of her earlier pieces of work, the track unfolds into a much more confident and self-assured sound. Around the chorus, the song explodes with electronic dance elements as she sings, “I’m crying again, crying over nothing”, inviting listeners to bop their heads where they might have curled up and bawled before. 

The album oscillates between these two poles, drifting seamlessly from soft, gentle touches to soaring, assertive anthems. ‘Dinner’ stands out as perhaps the most tender moment in the album, as De Souza narrates her healing journey, and the complex emotions associated with its highs and lows. She moves swiftly from “Giving with all I’ve got” to “Hurting like no one’s business”, her steady, uniform vocal tone contrasting with the conflicting subject matter. This juxtaposition stands as a characteristic of the album, epitomised in this track as she sings about how she laughs (“Laughing with me now”) while her voice is steeped in pain. 

‘Pass It By’ embraces the electronic sound debuted in ‘Crying Over Nothing’, and adopts a more hopeful tone than the rest of the record, as it ends on a quietly optimistic, “We’ll be alright if we can just pass it by”. With the “it” - De Souza’s personal demon - unspecified, the track opens itself out to any listener so they can project their own struggle into her lines and find solace to the beat of the drums.

The album closes out with the title track, where De Souza sings that she is “coming to a precipice” - standing at a cliff, figuratively reaching a turning point and concluding the album on a heartening note, we are to take the album as a journey through her - or our collective - healing process. 

Sitting at just over thirty minutes, the album is compact but bursting at the seams with emotion. While De Souza has been on a consistent run since 2021, with a new release nearly each year, it is clear that she has not exhausted her talent, and is continuously evolving and opening out her gorgeously glorious sound.