Indigo De Souza Doesn’t Have All the Answers, and That’s OK
“I don’t have answers — no one does/I’ve been finding comfort in that,” Indigo De Souza sings on the title track of her third album, All of This Will End. “There’s only love/There’s only moving through and trying your best.” It’s a welcome revelation for the North Carolina-based artist, whose songs have long been marked by fervent, desperate pleas. On 2018’s I Love My Mom and 2021’s Any Shape You Take, she was a bulldozing questioner, weaponizing repetition in an attempt to get to the bottom of something or absolve herself of any potential wrongdoing: “Was it something I said?” “I wanna know it’s not my fault.” “What are we gonna do now?” “If you want to change, I’ll be here to love you.”
Listening to those releases next to her latest one, a shift from obsessive rumination to radical acceptance becomes clear. “I think what changed is that I grew into my own self-worth, self-confidence, and self-love,” De Souza, 25, says. “In the past, there was a lot of feeling like it was all my fault and I was kind of this fucked-up human who wasn’t ever going to deserve anything good. That was a really dark place to be.” She’s emerging into the light now, buoyed by a new sense of gratitude.
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If the awareness of everything’s impermanence typically lends itself to one of two reactions — fearful anxiety or true liberation — then De Souza leans into the latter. “I called the album All Of This Will End because that’s my mantra every day,” she says. “It feels like I’m able to infuse every day of my life with intention and love and presence within my relationships. Because why not? Everything is going to end. I just want to do the best that I can do now.”
While there’s a throughline of triumph on the album, it’s also punctuated with raw acknowledgements of the turbulent reality of getting older and shedding the past. “Maybe I’ll just always be a little sad,” De Souza admits on “Parking Lot.” She grapples with the loneliness that creeps in while outgrowing friendships — even if it’s for the best in the long run — on “Losing”: “I keep feeling like an idiot when I reach out to touch and there is nobody there to see me.”
There’s righteous anger, too, the prodigal piece in the puzzle of closure. Where De Souza might have once emphasized her own inadequacy in an imbalanced relationship — “I want to believe that you’ve got a good heart,” she sang on 2018’s “Good Heart” — she’s beginning to step into her power with a biting conviction. “I’d like to think you’ve got a good heart and your dad was just an asshole growing up,” she smirks on “You Can Be Mean. “But I don’t see you trying that hard to be better than he is.”
“Going from that kind of era into the ‘You Can Be Mean’ era felt important,” she says. “At some point I just realized that I could have boundaries…I don’t have to continue putting myself in horrible situations.”
All of This Will End is a meditation on the few things we can control: the people we surround ourselves with, the love we choose to give and receive. “One of the most poignant things there is is the constant learning and growing with other people, moving through the parts that hurt a lot,” De Souza says. “That’s what community has started to mean to me: having this safe space to express yourself and not be turned away for any ugly parts of yourself.”
It’s a lifelong growth process, but the result is a newfound sense of warmth that’s infiltrated even De Souza’s physical world. “I used to like cool colors,” she says. “When I was feeling more depressed and wasn’t doing as well, I really was into blues and greens.” Now, her bedroom is showered in shades of red and orange, like the ones in the desert scene on the cover of All of This Will End, painted by her mother, Kimberly Oberhammer. (Her mom also created the costume De Souza wears in the music video for the record’s stirring closer, “Younger & Dumber.”) “It’s so contrasted from the other two albums,” she adds. “It feels really good that this album looks like a brighter thing. I feel like I’m in a brighter space and the album came from a brighter self.”
De Souza’s choice to have her mother paint all three of her album covers is intentional. “From the beginning I remember thinking that I wanted the characters to get a little older in every single one,” she says. “It’s kind of morbid, but I realized that it’s interesting to have my mom paint them, because she too is getting older. Every time that I ask her to paint a painting, she’s a little older than she was, and she’s getting closer and closer to when I will lose her.”
The longer De Souza has moved through the world, the more she’s been able to make peace with the destabilizing concept of mortality. She says her understanding of death has made her more present in her life than she’s ever been: “[It] used to be really sad and held a lot of weight. Now I think it actually gives my life a lot of meaning.”
Our time here is limited. Maybe no one sticks around for as long as we’d have wished they could. What’s left, then? There’s only love, moving through, trying your best. “Sometimes it’s not enough,” De Souza confesses at the end of the title track’s chorus. “Who gives a fuck? All of this will end.”
She’s also learning to speak her truth, calling All of This Will End her most “certain” work yet. “This is exactly what I’m saying, this is how you’re gonna hear it, this is what it means,” she says. “I don’t regret anything from this album. When I hear it, it sounds exactly like I wanted it to sound.”
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